CrimethInc.

The Anti-Deportation Collective : Fighting the Machinery of Deportation in France in the 1990s

2025-03-26T22:29:00Z

In the following account, the author recounts scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s. As Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their lackeys scapegoat the undocumented and kidnap immigrants who oppose genocide even when they hold green cards, it is a good time to study how people have resisted the violence of the state in other times and places.

This is adapted from the forthcoming memoir Another War Is Possible, narrating experiences from the global movement against fascism and capitalism at the turn of the century. If you’re interested in reading the rest of the book, you can back it on Kickstarter now.

Gare de Lyon: Paris, May 5, 1998

It’s early evening and Sophie and I are sitting in the long-distance-train waiting area of Paris’s Gare de Lyon, one of Europe’s busiest train stations. All around us are travelers scurrying to and fro. Stressed-out tourist families, a camera still flung around Dad’s neck, rushing their kids through the station mix with tired-looking businessmen waiting to get back home.

“You did a great job with your outfit,” she says to me as she looks me over from head to toe. I met Sophie at an action (or demonstration, or concert, or something of the sort) about a year ago, and we have been inseparable at political events since. She is my age, a student at Paris’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School),¹ and if I didn’t know very well the context in which she’s making this comment, I might think she’s flirting with me.

“You’re looking pretty good yourself,” I respond in kind.

She has managed to transform herself into the spitting image of your perfectly forgettable average French teenage girl. Basically, she looks like a younger Sporty Spice in her Adidas tracksuit and sneakers. I, on the other hand, have gone with a significantly preppier look: khaki pants, polo shirt, nondescript jacket, and moccasins. She looks at me again, pauses, and slightly withdraws her compliment: “It’s not the most functional wardrobe, though. The khakis stand out and the moccasins probably aren’t great for running.”

I shrug. “I did what I could. I was mainly concerned with getting this far.”

While we are sitting among the tourists and businessmen, doing our best to look like a somewhat mismatched young teenage couple waiting for a train back to their city, we are in fact not travelers, and the correct term for our attire is not outfit but disguise. We are not here to take a train, but to stop one. A train that transports imprisoned human beings against their will every single night. The 21:03 to Marseille, otherwise known to us as the deportation train.

Our objective is to stop the Paris-to-Marseille overnight train, which the French National Railway Company, better known for its French initials SNCF, permits the French government to use to transport North African immigrants, usually of Algerian or Moroccan origin, by rail to Marseille. Once in the port city, they are expelled from French territory by boat. The attempt to block this train is an idea born of the Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective), and it was decided that if we were to have any chance of success, we should disguise ourselves as best as possible and infiltrate the station in small groups, since trying to march in there as a demonstration probably wouldn’t get us very far.

The Anti-Deportation Collective

The CAE, officially formed only a few weeks earlier in early April 1998, was an autonomous collective born in the heat of the movement of the sans-papiers of the mid-’90s, a French term meaning “without papers” that refers to the movement against the deportation of undocumented immigrants and in favor of their “legalization.” The collective’s broadly accepted guiding principles² were as simple as they were clearly steeped in anarchist modes of organization, thought, and action:

Practical opposition to deportations.
We are not “allies” to the sans-papiers, we struggle with them out of motivations and convictions that are our own.
These motivations vary among individuals, but are in all cases rooted in anti-capitalism.
The collective is autonomous and collaborates with sans-papiers collectives that are autonomous not merely in theory, but in practice.
Decisions are made by way of general assembly.

The plight of the sans-papiers had exploded into the public consciousness following a series of highly publicized church occupations in 1996 by undocumented immigrants themselves. This culminated on August 23, 1996 in a raid in which nearly two thousand police officers stormed the Saint-Bernard church, resulting in the detention of 210 undocumented immigrants.

After that, solidarity demonstrations with the sans-papiers in Paris regularly numbered in the tens of thousands, with the participants—and their demands and methods of action—representing the broad spectrum of the French center left and radical left. This included the Communist Party and the CGT union, but likewise the sizable anarchist blocs of the CNT, Anarchist Federation, Alternative Libertaire, SCALP, and everything in between. Importantly, the sans-papiers themselves were organized into several collectives and structures; they were active and leading participants in their own struggles. As with all communities, they were not a monolith. Within the sans-papiers organizations, one could find a similarly broad spectrum of ideas and strategies in regards to demands, objectives, and methods of action.

While the sans-papiers organizations, regardless of their politics, were limited in their methodology by the logical constraints of their situation—the fact that an arrest or identity control could quickly lead to a possible deportation with devastating, even deadly, potential consequences—the reformist organizations were unsurprisingly bound by the constraints of their respect for legality and their acceptance of the basic premises of states and borders and the idea that a human being should in some way or another be bound by the possession of a particular piece of paper, or lack thereof, based on their place of birth.

Or, even more absurdly, as is the case in France, their bloodline.

We anarchists, on the other hand, had no such constraints. Our solidarity with what were clearly some of the most oppressed and marginalized groups in society—workers, people of color, many of them women, escaping from what were some of the most horrendous conflicts in the world at that time—was immediate and instinctive. But through our position of unconditional solidarity with the sans-papiers and the assertion that in the world we are fighting for, no human will ever be illegal and freedom of movement will be for people and not just for commodities, we articulated a position of necessary rupture with the concepts of states and borders. If our demands could not be granted by the state and our objective could not be realized within the framework of its existence, then it naturally followed that we would not look to the state to grant those things.

Consequently, we were embarking on a concrete struggle to prevent deportations and make it possible for people to live where they chose and how they chose. The same stance toward the state applied in this struggle as in our abstract analysis: the state was our enemy, and we were determined to wage war against it within the appropriate context of the time and situation we found ourselves in, in hopes of preventing it from carrying out its objectives. The greater our success, hand in hand with those sans-papiers who were open to our solidarity and methods, the greater our collective power would grow as a movement and the greater the degree of agency, autonomy, and freedom we would be able to realize.

We were not making demands, but seeking to force concessions and create realities. Concretely, that meant that deportations are for stopping. To do so, we would attack the state’s machinery of deportation, its infrastructure, and the enterprises that collaborated with it and benefited economically from assisting with the hunting, caging, and expelling of human beings.

We did so out of solidarity, out of conviction, but also with the explicit understanding that despite our privileges and different realities, our struggle was the same as theirs. In fighting alongside the sans-papiers, as accomplices rather than allies, we were also fighting for ourselves:

“Their situation makes us all more precarious in labor relations, the repression and control developed against them will affect us eventually as well, the hardening of borders is also a barrier to our freedom of movement, because we are also foreigners to this world and we will be pushed further and further into clandestinity (by choice but also by necessity if we are to live our desires) by the constant evolution of the law and the states.”³

The 21:03 to Marseille

So there we are, sitting under the elegant industrial-era steel and glass roof so typical of venerable European train stations—a fittingly dramatic setting for the impending confrontation. We are waiting anxiously for the moment when an unknown number of cops will appear, escorting what I expect will be a handcuffed individual through the hall, at which point we are to spring into action and form a human chain to prevent them from loading him onto the train. Failing that, we are to do everything we can to prevent the train from departing. We are not pacifists, and while there is a general consensus that our side will avoid unnecessary escalations, there is an equally clear agreement that the priority is not optics, but accomplishing a concrete and tangible objective.

Nonetheless, I’m anxious about our chances of success. “Do you see any familiar-looking faces?” I ask worriedly. I’m scanning the hall as best I can and I don’t like what I see.

“No, I can’t even see Alan or Mary. I wonder if they made it in.” Mary is another Lycée Autogéré student and Sophie’s best friend, while Alan is slightly older and the token cliché-looking punk—complete with mohawk and faux leather jacket—in our little youth affinity group.

Not one of us is old enough to be a legal adult, yet the four of us already have a fair amount of experience getting into trouble with the state. We met at a Comité d’Action Lycéen (CAL, or “High School Action Committee”) meeting, a place that can only be described as a breeding ground for high-school-age anarchists.

We’re young, fanatical, and unencumbered by wage slavery enough to enjoy ample free time, which we use to be regulars at every demonstration, action, occupation, political squat, concert, debate, and confrontation within the greater Paris area. When we’re not doing that, we’re spending our nights together drinking, getting stoned, and listening to Ska-P’s “El vals del obrero” in the catacombs under the streets of Paris. Or at least the others are—myself, I’ve discovered Sergei Nechayev’s Catechism of the Revolutionist and concluded that my mind and body are weapons for revolutionary struggle, so I should keep them free of drugs and alcohol. This makes me lots of fun at parties.

Still, no matter how combative we may be, no matter how sharp I keep my proverbial weapons, if there are only twenty of us when the cops show up, this is probably not going to go well. “Fucking unions,” Sophie mutters under her breath. “What are they good for if they can’t even bring out fifty people for something like this?” Her complaint is directed at SUD, short for Solidaire, Unitaire, Démocratique (“In Solidarity, United, Democratic”), a small leftist union born in the aftermath of the 1995 general strike, whose railway branch had promised to mobilize for this action.

I shrug. “Who knows, it’s not like we know what they look like. Maybe it’ll work out.”

I’m trying to be positive, because this is the route we have chosen; if we’re at the ball, we might as well dance. It doesn’t seem like there are many alternatives available, anyway. A couple of weeks earlier, we were able to occupy the tracks, successfully delaying the train for a few hours. The cops eventually cleared the tracks via a liberal use of batons and CS gas, and when we returned a few days later, we found an army of police guarding the tracks.

“Look, look, right there!” Sophie points to one of the entrances to the hall, her voice trembling with a mix of excitement and anger. I’m just spotting what she is pointing at, a young man probably in his twenties being led by an escort of seven or eight cops, when immediately my concerns about our numbers today are erased. From every corner of the hall comes a loud burst of disapproving whistling, followed immediately by what seems like the entire crowded hall erupting in thunderous chants of “Non, non, non… aux expulsions!” amplified and rendered even more urgent by the echoes generated by the closed space in which we find ourselves.

The first few people rise from their seats, sprint over to where the line of CRS riot police are guarding access to the platform and the train, and link arms. A few more join them. Then dozens more. Friends and comrades appear from everywhere among the crowd. The chants declaring that no human being is illegal ring loud and constant as we too join the human chain. There are hundreds of us! There are so many of us that we form two lines across the opening to the platform—one facing the cops who were already stationed there to prevent us from attempting to get access to the tracks, and another facing back toward the hall, preventing the cops who are escorting a captive from reaching the train. Sophie and I find ourselves in the first of those two lines.

The next few minutes pass in an adrenaline-fueled blur. The sight of the person we are trying to protect from deportation right in front of us illustrates poignantly what is at stake, and the disconcerted looks of his police escort only embolden us. Clearly, they aren’t sure whether to push through or abort.

The police are familiar with resistance to deportations. We regularly show up at airports, informing passengers as well as airline workers about what is happening on their flights and what their employers are making them unwilling accomplices to, urging passengers to refuse to fly on flights that are simultaneously prisoner transports. We have had varying degrees of success. We’ve tried to disrupt and prevent deportations too, as we did a few weeks earlier at this same spot.

But we’ve never done this.

At least, never by the hundreds, never with the palpable feeling that we might actually succeed. I think the cops sense that, too.

The next scene is of an extreme and almost intimate violence. Clearly, the order has been given to clear access to the train. CS gas and batons fly all around us. We are not armed. We have no flagpoles, no helmets, not even the cloth of a banner to protect ourselves with. Masks cover our faces while linked arms keep us together, but this leaves us practically defenseless against the baton blows. With neither word nor warning, the riot cop directly to my right pulls out a metal retractable baton from the inside pocket of his jacket, and in one swift motion he extends it and brings it down with a thud against the head of a comrade next to me. I hear the crack and immediately see blood gushing from the wound at the top of his forehead. His arms go limp, and the best I can do is kind of release my arm, which I have linked around his, and push him backward as he slumps, so that he falls toward the line of comrades facing the station and not at the feet of these unhinged cops.

Before I can assess the wisdom of this course of action, I am already instinctively launching a kick at the stomach of the cop who has injured my neighbor. This cop has been sneering at us since we stood up, waiting for his moment to injure a “gauchiste de merde,” the French for “piece-of-shit leftist,” which is exactly what nationalists and fascists like to call us in Argentina, as well. Sophie yells for me to get back, but her voice barely registers on my radar. Comrades break the line to carry away the injured friend just as I broke ranks with my kick. Still others, blinded or unable to breathe due to the CS gas, also break ranks and retreat.

The young Algerian is forced onto the train. The following week’s edition of Le Monde Libertaire, the weekly newspaper of the francophone Anarchist Federation, later reported⁴ that the train

“departed with a delay of thirty minutes. […] The train would stop several kilometers farther, in Melun, waiting for another train transporting approximately half of its original passengers.”

The missing passengers had been unable to board due to the clashes between demonstrators and police.

“The train was again stopped at the Lyon-Perrache station around 2:30 am by activists there, but not before having made an unscheduled stop at L’Estaque station to disembark the prisoners and place them in the detention center at Arenc, as the cops were concerned about the possible actions of further demonstrators in Marseille.”

There are still two clearly defined fronts inside the waiting area. We are standing on one side, now about twenty meters or so away from the trains.

A small group of people start to leave—about twenty people, all wearing high-visibility vests. They are the SUD railway trade unionists, who had shown up to the action after all, but decided that with the departure of the train, their participation was over.

The rest of us still number solidly in the hundreds. In the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing. It’s poor attendance even at a third-division football match, barely enough people to fill a subway car. Even a strictly anarchist demonstration in Paris could number into the thousands. But in my eyes at that moment, these people are the whole world. Who cares about numbers, optics, or the opinion of sheep? I feel at home among these two hundred who have put their bodies behind the conviction that no human being is illegal, who have shown with their actions that the state and its agents are to be confronted head-on.

Rather two hundred ultra-leftists, adventurists, extremists, or whatever else they may call us than two thousand who will stand idly by because party or union discipline says now is not the moment and this is not the way—or twenty thousand who will march down the street with us proclaiming that no human being is illegal, only to placidly continue with their day while others are dragged, often drugged and bound, to prisoner transports. I’m grateful for the participation of the sympathizer, the unionist, the party member, the reformist. I understand we need them to exert political pressure. But I feel now that my place is with the militants and the fighters, no matter the numbers.

In front of us is a wall of riot cops, now too far to reach us with their gas and truncheons. The idea of police as the armed guards that enforce the dictatorship of capital through the state-sanctioned monopoly of violence gave way to a much more urgent feeling—a burning hatred of those who hurt my friends in order to perpetrate injustice. Whoever wears that uniform is the immediate means of our oppression and therefore my enemy.

Somebody has come back from another track with a backpack full of stones. As the chants against deportation continue to roar, a few dozen of us attack the cops. There’s sadness and frustration still, because we failed, but there is also joy. There is a feeling of collective refusal and liberation.

Too Much and Never Enough

As we finally make our retreat from the station, smashing security cameras, advertisement panels, and automated ticket counters along the way, I am already thinking about the young Algerian whose deportation we were trying to stop. Tonight wasn’t about making an abstract political statement against deportations. It wasn’t a militant yet still symbolic action against the machinery of expulsion and the barbarism that categorizes human beings based on where they happen to have been born. The objective was to stop the kidnapping of a specific human being. And while there is still some distant hope that comrades farther down the line, in Lyon or in Marseille, might still succeed, we, at least, have failed, and my mind is already focused on how I, or we collectively, can do more.

Despite my concerns that we didn’t do enough, the very next day, I am confronted with the press and the good citizens of Paris howling that we did too much. I pick up a newspaper on the way to school and find articles pontificating about the extremists at the train station, outraged at the disorder, condemning the supposed outbreak of violence. Too much disorder, too much violence—words coming from exasperated good citizens of Paris as they walk past me at the very same train station and see the smashed ticket-vending machines. The constant hand-wringing about “the extreme left, emboldened, becoming increasingly aggressive, violent, and dangerous” has only intensified since the election of the socialist and communist center-left government coalition.

What was damaged? As I make my way through the station, I take note of the “damage.” The only damage to the station is to the machines that hinder our freedom of movement and convert the need to get from one place to another into an economic consideration. To the advertising panels that pollute public space and turn any place where the human eye might rest its gaze into propaganda for the constant consumption of goods we don’t need. And finally, to the increasingly ubiquitous security cameras, ensuring that anyone who rejects this system of consumption and control can be more efficiently surveilled and criminalized.

What precious order did we disrupt? If the order they are referring to is this superficial peace and tranquility that has nothing to do with justice, then the problem is not that we were violent or disorderly but that we effectively disrupted the orderly procedures of oppression. The order of those who prefer the continuation of oppression as long as they can turn a blind eye to it—or worse, celebrate it in the name of nationalism or racism—to the turbulence of the struggle to end it.

Violence? We threw some stones, probably injured nobody. The injured were on our side, those who faced the armed forces of the state with not much more than our bodies and the occasional flying object. What is a few smashed ticketing machines and advertisements compared to the violence we witnessed? The violence that takes place constantly, unceasingly, in every immigrant neighborhood swept by kidnappers working for the state—during every ticket control in the subway that triggers a domino effect that ends in deportation—on flights leaving constantly with prisoners, often drugged and handcuffed, transported as human cargo against their will.

In regards to the life of this man, I don’t intend to shock or traumatize with speculations about what his fate might be, what his circumstances were, whether he was torn from a family, a partner, a project, his dreams. It doesn’t matter. I assert his freedom to live as he chooses and where he chooses because my anarchism demands this as a minimum condition of human dignity and a rejection of the system of states and borders that I seek to destroy. This violence, this war on individuals in the name of states and nations, is the only relevant violence here, the violence that is carried out in the defense of oppression.

It is a machine of violence built to protect and perpetuate the system of exploitation and human suffering that pits human against human in a needless struggle for survival. A machine that has colonized the minds of people to such an extent that they can only recognize violence at the point of impact—the fist striking a face, the rock striking the policeman’s shield—and only when it interrupts the order that ordinarily inflicts it.

This renders invisible the ceaseless unspeakable violence that flows from the system of nations, capital, and class society: death due to lack of access to health care, famine and hunger created by artificial scarcity, workplace accidents and deaths caused by the drive to skimp on safety measures in order to maximize profits, endless religious and nationalist wars. Immigrants drown in the seas around Fortress Europe or die of dehydration in the heat of the Arizona desert in desperate attempts to escape poverty and improve their lives. This systemic violence, the violence of oppression, barely even registers to most as such.

I make my way through the city, still lost in my thoughts as I exit the subway into the largely immigrant neighborhood where the CNT offices are. Two cops are parked outside the subway, nonchalantly checking people’s identification at random. “Papers, please.” The normality of everyday violence.

Faced with this reality, who cares about legality? Who cares about popular opinion? When there were few of us and we occupied the tracks, our action was completely peaceful. Yet the mercenaries of the state came and beat us without hesitation in order to achieve its objectives. Although they were able to accomplish this in a relatively “orderly” manner, due to our small numbers and tactical avoidance of violence, was that not the victory of an immeasurably greater violence? Would a greater violence on our end, for the purposes of liberation, not be justified? In what thought process does it follow that nonviolence represents the moral high ground, when adherence to nonviolence makes the perpetuation of human suffering and oppression possible?

There is a moment that I will never forget from the day we were beaten off the tracks a few weeks prior to the story I have recounted.

I can barely see him through the glass, his complexion and the reflection of the station lights against the train’s windows making it difficult to distinguish his features and facial expressions. Two cops are moving him through the train, one holding each arm behind him, his hands cuffed together in front. Suddenly, as they pass an open window we can clearly see as he turns to us. He lifts his hands and displays a victory sign with each, as he mouths “thank you” to us. There is sadness, dignity, and gratitude in his face. I don’t know anything about him, who he is, where he is from, what brought him here, what he is being sent back to. But I know that violence—life-changing and potentially fatal violence—is not taking place in the delaying of the train. Violence is what is being done to him inside it.

It’s not that we are too violent, but exactly the opposite. If we don’t employ the full arsenal of our capacity for collective revolutionary action, to be a force against the system of control that oppresses all of us, are we not as complicit as those who see it but choose to turn away?

What we are doing is not too much.

It’s not nearly enough.

Survival : A Story about Anarchists Enduring Mass Raids

2025-03-21T09:59:15Z

A work of speculative fiction.

In November 1919, United States President Woodrow Wilson launched mass raids against the entire anarchist movement in the United States. Police simultaneously arrested thousands of anarchists in many different parts of the country, shutting down their newspapers, organizations, and meeting halls.

If similar raids were to take place today, they would occur in a technological landscape involving mass surveillance and targeted electronic attacks. Those who survive would also have to adopt different tools.

Escape

When the police battering ram hits his door at 4:11 am, Jake is in his boxers on the floor, playing an emulated sidescroller. The adrenaline hits and within seconds he has jammed his bedroom window open, sliding down into the backyard and off in a run, his socks instantly soaked in the grass. He hears shouting but doesn’t look back to check if there are pigs looking out his window or chasing him from the side of the house, he jumps the back fence more awkwardly than he imagined, getting a splinter deep in his left hand, but he ignores it and dashes over the roof of the neighbor’s shed, trying to remember every detail of the surrounding blocks.

In what feels like an instant, he’s two blocks away, hiding behind some bushes as a squad car drives by. His breath sounds to him like the loudest thing in the world and his mind spins as he imagines a neighbor coming out behind him. He’s in nothing but boxers and muddy socks and his hand is dripping blood. Nothing happens. The squad car crawls down another block. Time to move.

Vera is almost home from work, listening to music in her earphones, when she comes around a bend and sees the corner of a SWAT van outside her punk house. She pivots immediately down another street, casually continuing her walk while pulling out her phone, she knows she should immediately turn it off but first she texts a group chat “House being raided” and then turns it off. Maybe that warning will help someone. Many phone batteries remain active even when the device is off, she knows; right now, some lazy junior officer could be noticing the GPS or her network connection triangulating her as she moves away. Should she throw it? Should she abruptly stomp on her phone out here on the street? There’s a drainage vent coming up, she could toss it in and keep walking. Vera hesitates. Her phone is “encrypted,” but against everyone’s advice she uses a short password. If they dig it out of the drain… she doesn’t know how to pry out the SD card, stomping on the whole device might draw attention and not even destroy the main memory… time is of the essence, so she makes a hard choice quickly and just tosses the whole thing in the drain. She’s just a normal person on a walk.

As she keeps walking away, Vera hears a car rolling up behind her slowly, it takes every ounce of willpower to keep walking normally, not to look back in terror. Maybe she should? Maybe she should just run for it? The car parks behind her and there are sounds of a mom unloading young kids. She’s not being followed. Where to now?

Julie and Maggie sit at their dining room table, struggling not to reflect panic at each other. Only one news outlet is even reporting the nationwide raids and there’s almost nothing there. Messages saying “Leave and then delete this group chat” keep popping up for both of them. Little spatters of reports on raids and then silence; a friend who is always too frantic is spamming everyone asking for updates, then suddenly she’s silent.

There’s an hour of nothing.

They trade terse updates with a friend who lives far away. Someone local suddenly appears online, but only to post a meme in a dead channel and then disappear.

The same music plays on the same radio stations. The wind blows through the trees. A cousin asks for advice with a preschool situation, totally oblivious. The local news does a puff piece about a local business. The neighbors get a pizza delivery.

“They’re probably not going to come for us. We haven’t done anything.”

Their confused dog is whining with shared nerves. Maggie keeps eyeing the go-bag by the door they packed together months ago. That afternoon, Julie had made a show of being a good sport, humoring her need to prep; now all Maggie can think about is everything they’re missing. Julie’s passport has just expired. Can they get across the border? If only they had done a dry run. They take the dog out on a walk, leaving all devices home, whispering potential plans to one another, trying not to draw attention as a jogger passes them by.

When they get home, there’s a private message on Instagram from a friend saying they’re putting together a legal defense committee, first meeting will be public, at a public park, they’re inviting some local liberal journalists as shields. Someone at the local alt-weekly says she’s writing a story. There’s a lawyer coming from a big-name liberal thing.

The internet keeps being really slow. Signal doesn’t deliver messages and then suddenly delivers three all at once. Loading a lot of websites just returns errors. They’re so sleep-deprived with stress that when they finally crash together on the couch, they sleep right through the defense committee meeting. A friend knocks loudly on their door and they nearly die of heart attacks, assuming it’s the cops. His report back is terse: almost no journalists showed. Most of the folks who went have been grabbed. One was driven down off her bike on her way home. An old liberal lawyer went to the county jail with a court order and the cops just laughed and arrested her. He’s going underground and suggests they do too.

But Julie and Maggie have a life, they have jobs—at least for now, as they’ve both called out sick—and they have a house. They’re normal now, even law-abiding. Burn a few posters, donate a few books to the neighborhood little libraries, delete a few accounts, maybe they can pass as upstanding citizens.

“If we leave our shit here and stop paying, we’ll lose everything we’ve built since poverty, plus have to pay some ridiculous fine.”

If they do get raided, maybe it’ll be just a few days in lock up, in and out, just a performance of a crackdown. The libs will get mad about the lawyers, surely.

Neither of them has been able to cook since the raids first started, so they drive out together to grab pickup. Waiting for a light, Maggie stares at something on the side of the street and then leaps out the truck passenger’s side door without a word. Julie is frightened at first, then furious, but when she pulls the truck over and heads back to Maggie, she sees her partner kneeling next to a homeless man lying at an odd angle.

“We don’t have our phones, we can’t call a paramedic,” she reminds Maggie. But then recognition dawns on her. It’s one of their friends. Under the mess of blisters and swollen bruises, his eyes are open, staring at nothing.

He lived in one of the first punk houses that was raided, he never went to anything besides some hardcore shows, he was just a baker.

They don’t pick up their meal. They head home. Dog. Go-bag. Some last-minute additional ideas. Camping gear. Encrypted backup drives. Medicine. Dry food. Clothes. Blankets.

Phones and leftover devices smashed. House key hidden somewhere in the yard for a friend. Maggie looks at her cheap Casio watch. “That’s time; we need to go.”

Resources

Jake has been tagging and dumpster-diving for years, so he knows his neighborhood pretty well. Just as he’s noticed what gets cleaned and what does not, he’s noticed what gets moved and what does not. What gets paid attention to and what does not.

There’s a moss-covered rock in a local park that never gets moved. No one even goes near it. There’s a roof of an abandoned building littered with garbage.

Long ago, Jake took two plastic bottles and sealed inside each a ziplock bag with a small amount of cash and two USBs each. Then he buried one bottle in the dirt underneath the rock and taped another bottle underneath a non-functioning vent on the roof of an abandoned building.

In each bottle, one USB contains an encrypted KeepassX database with the distinct login information of every online account he has, as well as a VeraCrypt encrypted folder with various files he wanted to make sure he never lost (scans of his IDs, photos of friends) including a GPG key pair. He has encrypted both with a passphrase of five randomly chosen dictionary words committed to memory. “Veritable Sasquatch Humdinger Locality Peeps.” He has practiced this every night for weeks, building all kinds of associations and mnemonics. Unencrypted on the drives are executable files to install KeepassX, Veracrypt, and GPG on any new computer. On the other USB is a full install of the Tails operating system.

Jake knows he looks a mess in his boxers and muddy socks, but he gets to the park and digs up the bottle without a squad car seeing him or some vigilante neighbor raising a fuss. The twenty and two tens inside will have to be enough. Luckily, there’s a small houseless encampment nearby and an old lady is willing to part with a sweater for ten. A free box happens to have a (too large) pair of sneakers. He desperately tries to make his boxers look like shorts and walks to a thrift store, quickly emerging with a backpack, a t-shirt, a baseball cap, and a pair of pants.

A visit to a corner-store bathroom with a razor and hair dye, and his appearance is at least a little different. He buys a cheap first aid kit for the splinter in his hand.

With his cash broken into change, he can catch a bus across town.

When Jake gets near the first house of comrades, not only are the cops there, but his friends are still in their underwear and hogtied on the lawn. A cop is violently molesting a friend of his under the pretense of a search while the others laugh. Jake keeps moving.

At the second house, there are no squad cars, but the front door is visibly missing. Jake notices someone sitting in an unmarked car across the street. He keeps walking.

The third house he tries belongs to a largely apolitical friend. It’s a struggle to try to get him not to proclaim surprise loudly on the front porch and not to talk near devices. “I just need to borrow a couple hundred, man, then I’ll be out of your hair. I never saw you, you never saw me. Please.”

Jake leaves with a hundred, a filled water bottle, a better hoodie, a better pair of shoes with dry socks, and a dusty old laptop.

It’s not enough bus fare to get to the border. He needs a sleeping bag, but REI has been implementing stronger anti-theft policies and the longer he fucks around town, the more likely he is to get stopped. He’s terrified of facial recognition/tracking software on the buses, and his thrift store baseball cap isn’t going to protect him forever.

He scopes out the city bus terminal from some distance, but it looks like this one checks ID and there’s a cop wandering around. Instead, he catches a city bus out to a distant suburb on the edge of rural two-lane roads, trying to hitch. Hopefully, the cops out here aren’t actively looking for him and won’t harass a hitchhiker. A state patrol car passes him without incident. He has no success for hours and it starts to grow dark, so it’s back to the city.

Worried about cash, in the middle of the night, he climbs the roof of his second stash, but it’s missing. Probably the tape eroded months ago and it fell off. Hope the person who found it could use the cash. If they opened one of the USBs, it would just prove cryptic, no way to even learn what was encrypted.

It’s a cold night, sleeping rough without a sleeping bag, and in the morning, Jake takes refuge in the back of a café, where he still has enough cash for a warm drink. He takes out the dusty old laptop from his friend and the Tails USB, booting it and accessing the internet over Tor. The connection to the Tor network has trouble, so he chooses “Configure Connection” and selects different bridges until he finds one that works.

A few anarchist counterinfo sites are reporting the raids, but a surprising number of sites are down entirely. Local news says almost nothing besides statist blather. Social media is trash with speculation from those least informed. Foreign noblogs and indymedia sites have the most relevant reporting.

Signal is down, something about centralized architecture, comments speculate about international law, but it doesn’t matter right now. Riseup allegedly melted their servers with thermite during a raid and were all arrested. Protonmail has apparently been collaborating, injecting spyware onto user’s devices, and some people are surprised by this? Wire is “temporarily unavailable.” A few people leave links urging people to use various apps or tools Jake’s never heard of. Other people debate the technical merits, but he has a hard time understanding. One new app is blowing up pretty quickly, lots of people attest to it being good, but this seems mostly based on them finding it easy to use. One person says they are still trying to use a smartphone but then goes quiet. One account that was quiet for a while starts speaking differently.

In the comments section on a formerly obscure site, someone says, “This is Big C, I’m free, a group of us are forming up at a secure location, contact me through a secure channel.” Jake knows this is Cookie, a local organizer.

After a little struggle, Jake manages to get the most popular new “encrypted communication” apps temporarily installed on his Tails instance. He joins one of the public channels that some comments encouraged using. It’s basically like Telegram or Discord: a flood of posting and arguing. Folks who’ve survived the raids using these new accounts try to imply who they are without saying it openly. It’s an amateur hour shitshow of oblique flailing: “Remember that one time when we did that one thing, I was the one who wore green.” Turns out one of the worst assholes in the scene is still free and he’s using the opportunity to crow.

Even when the crude “only you would know X” games imply an account is a given comrade, Jake knows that such details could simply be copy-pasted from a compromised device via some man-in-the-middle attack where the cops sit between two parties relaying their messages back and forth as if they’re the other person.

This is not enough to trust an internet post enough to meet up.

Vera walks immediately to the house of her old friend Cat. She scopes the front from down the street, notices Cat’s Subaru is missing, and makes her way in through the backyard. Vera has held on to a spare key for years, but their friendship is almost entirely offline. They don’t even bring devices when they hang out. As far as the outside world knows, Cat is just another park ranger doing ecological restoration.

Ten years ago, they burned down a condo together.

Vera cries and trembles the second she closes the back door behind her, falling into a fetal position. Cat’s house is pristine, beautiful, safe.

Vera rocks back and forth, trying to remember breathing exercises. Has her heart always been this loud? Is she dying?

After an eternity, she gets up and starts doing stretches and exercises. She pictures herself punching through the faces of the cops back at her house. She knows she needs to work out the adrenaline. She needs to—oh god she needs to drink water.

Cat’s house is like a warm security blanket. Everything is just right.

Vera lies on the floor of the living room for hours, not moving. Listening way too attentively to the sounds of cars going by. Is Cat even in town? Should she make something from her food in the pantry?

The slow crunching sound of Cat’s Subaru coming to rest in the driveway is an immense relief. Cat is surprised about the raids, but she grasps the severity, hugs Vera, and tries to throws lentils and veggies in an Instapot while listening and asking questions. While dinner cooks, Cat brings out an old laptop she rarely uses and they check the major news sites together, careful not to enter search terms or anything that might flag.

In some sense, it’s a relief to learn the raids were beyond just Vera’s house. They’re not targeted at Vera specifically. But no one seems to have been released yet, so it’s clearly not safe to leave. Cat makes up a futon for Vera in the basement. “Of course you can stay the night. You can stay as long as you need.”

Vera takes off her earrings and places them carefully beside her work bag. In each earring is a tiny sliver of a USB stick. Each of them is just like Jake’s: encrypted KeepassX database, encrypted file system, GPG keys, installation executables for Veracrypt and KeepassX.

In the morning, Vera will investigate what can be done with Cat’s laptop.

Julie and Maggie make three stops before heading out of town, first at Julie’s bank, where she successfully empties most of her account into five thousand in cash. But at Maggie’s bank, the teller disappears for a long while and doesn’t come back. “You know what, never mind, I’ll go to a different bank,” Maggie says to another teller, using her best imitation Karen voice. They drive off, heads on a swivel for cop cars. Finally, they slip a note into a friend’s mailbox explaining where to find their house key and some instructions for their lease.

They collect every credit or debit card they have and tape them together under a seat, never to be used again.

They take off quickly. Back roads to avoid license plate readers, then long country roads. It’s hard to navigate without their phones. Each of them picks a personality type and fashion style that signals no political or subcultural allegiance. They make up a backstory about how they’re friends and try to bicker in convenience stores to avoid looking queer. They pick up a bumper sticker they’d otherwise be livid at and slap it on.

At a campsite two hundred miles away, they go through all their remaining belongings. They have a tarp, a tent, two sleeping bags, a gallon jug of water, a Sawyer microfiltration water purifier, a five-gallon bucket of rice and beans, a camp stove, a couple pads, trashy books for boredom.

They end up buying basic comforts like folding chairs with their cash reserves.

“It’s just a camping trip, until it isn’t.”

They go on a hike with their dog and talk about communities they can flee to. A land defense occupation that became permanent. A log cabin squat built deep off any path on federal land. A friend’s organic farm with some partially abandoned yurts.

They discuss the pros and cons of various cults they know.

In the end they drive to the furthest option, the organic farm.

The drive is long.

On a thin winding back road, they stack up behind a long line of cars. Local vigilantes are performing an inspection to check for “ANTIFA.” A middle-aged white lady with an AR waves them through cheerily. “Stay safe out there!”

The next town has a small “rally for democracy” along the central drag, besides an Arby’s. A couple dozen liberals in folding chairs hold cardboard placards making puns about the suspension of a cable news channel.

At a gas station, Julie overhears two men confidently talking about the investment opportunities in real estate being opened up as all the “cockroaches” are removed.

One night, they sleep in their car in a Walmart parking lot on the advice of a friendly night auditor at a cheap motel. “New regulations, I can’t take a cash deposit. And there’s this thing I gotta enter your IDs into that wires them nationally.”

When they finally arrive at the farm and are allowed past the gate, there are already fifteen other people there: extended family of the owning couple, a couple of WWOOFer hippies, and two coteries of obvious radicals who are cagey and cold to anyone they don’t know.

Everyone is antsy.

Different groups cook different food. Panicked envy flickers in some eyes.

Two weeks in and Julie keeps to herself. Maggie spends her time trying to suck up to the owners and befriends an autistic nerd with one of the other radical groups.

An old balding white dude in a black hoodie keeps snapping at their dog. A trip into town for bulk food goes badly after the nerd insists on wearing a mask and a confrontation breaks out with a local. A backed-up toilet in the farm house makes the owners dour for a couple days.

One night, the situation boils over and folks start openly talking about the raids. There’s fury over who has a device and who can be trusted to have a device. Who is putting everyone else in danger. Who has a right to be here. Who has a right to anything. After someone brings up “Land back,” someone else screams, “Who do you think you’re fooling?! Who are your people exactly?! You’re not Indigenous, you’re as white as me!” and an awkward physical fight breaks out.

The next morning, there are immigration police visible in the distance at the neighboring farm. One of the hippies finds three young girls hiding down by the river and rushes them into one of the plastic yurts everyone else is hiding in.

Dogs bark in the distance. Julie joins the couple that owns the farm in meeting the immigration agents. Her dog barks at theirs and they put them away. The immigration agents are some of the newly deputized conspiracy heads that have barely any training, and Julie is able to find common cultural ground with them, ranting about how genetically modified organisms are poisoning the land, leaning hard into the persona she’s studiously built on the road. The wannabe genocidaires laugh at her jokes and leave, waving back to her.

The girls’ white uncle was allowed to remain, a nasty gash across his forehead. The rest of the family is being taken to one of the deportation camps where people die of dehydration. He’s profoundly grateful for the rescue of his nieces.

Over the next month, the adjacent farms begin to merge. A dugout hiding spot becomes a tunnel network. Maybe it’ll suffice to hide folks if cops return.

Some new folks arrive, fleeing other things.

Tensions break down, relationships begin to form across the groups.

One of the quieter members starts opening up, giving lectures on syntropic agriculture, and an array of projects rapidly consume all the spare land across the farms. As people get busy developing personal domains and projects to be invested in, the overall vibe improves dramatically.

Food gets pooled. People become more open about what devices they held onto, but it doesn’t matter as much, because all of the old internet is gone. A few specific corporate sites remain accessible, whitelisted by telecoms for the sake of commerce, but almost everything else is gone. You can get Amazon deliveries and send Gmail, but it’s impossible to reach Wikipedia, much less Athens Indymedia or any Noblogs.

The farm establishes a consensus on how devices are to be used. The owners maintain all their devices in the farm house, air-gapped from everyone else. News stories and everything else are downloaded to a USB by one person for an hour every day, then passed around the three laptops everyone else shares.

There’s one burner cell phone for the whole farm, bought with cash at one of the last Walmarts where that is possible. It’s kept turned off and wrapped in plastic bags under a rock five miles away along the side of a road. It’s for emergencies and strictly overseen usage. No one will put its SIM card in or turn it on near the farm or its stash location.

Having swapped out plates and tags, Julie and Maggie occasionally drive into the local town. They sit behind a café in their truck while it’s closed at night and tap into the still-active Wi-Fi with their laptop running Tails. Signal is long gone. Tor is totally inaccessible, even using the latest smuggled bridges. On the plain internet, they have managed to register two Gmail accounts using the farm’s collective burner phone. How can they find other comrades? How can they talk with them?

Communications

Jake doesn’t have to trust the new app everyone’s using while Signal’s down. Long ago, everyone in his affinity group created GPG key pairs, then verified each other’s keys and signed them. They also created private backup email accounts on other platforms only to be used in emergencies.

Jake’s Riseup email account may be down, but his GPG keys were in the encrypted folder on his cached USB along with a list of the backup email accounts of his comrades. He goes through each one, encrypting a message to that person’s public key and sending it to their backup email.

After a couple hours at the café, one of them sends a message back to him. Ethan is still free! Jake asks if he knows anything about Big C’s supposed posts. Ethan says he’ll check with someone in Big C’s crew he’s also in contact with, Ash.

Ash emails back with a public key for Big C. She signs his key with her own. Ethan checks it and sees that it matches the public key for Ash that he’s signed. Then he signs Big C’s key and sends it to Jake.

Jake messages Big C on the new app everyone is using. Instead of sending anything in cleartext, he encrypts a message to the key he has for Big C. He adds his own public key.

On that same app, in the general channel they’re all using, someone’s screaming that another account is a honeypot. People stop posting. If they move to a different channel or a different app, they never send Jake anything about it.

But that doesn’t matter, because Big C responds, his message likewise encrypted using GPG and then pasted within this new app.

Jake decrypts and checks that it was signed by the same key for Big C that his friend Ethan certified.

There’s a time and location. Back room of a donut shop a couple punks work at, 11 pm.

Jake spends most of the day at the café, trying not to attract attention. Then he scarfs down some fast food and gets a bus across town to the donut shop. He gets off a couple stops early and circles around it on back streets, looking for any car or person that could be staking things out. He decides to wait a little longer in an alley. But the alley isn’t empty. Ethan’s there, smoking a cigarette and also scoping things out.

They hug. “You’re the first person I’ve seen in like two days, man.”

Ethan’s heard a rumor about some kind of legal defense committee being set up, but he can’t stand one of the people he thinks is in it.

Jake quietly regales him with the saga of his nearly-nude escape.

They look at the donut shop down the street.

“If it’s a trap, maybe only one of us should go.”

“I’ll go. If it’s chill, I’ll come back out and get you?”

“Maybe they raid us only once we’re all inside.”

“Do you wanna wait out here all night?”

“Fuck, man. I dunno.”

Jake goes in.

A punk he doesn’t know ushers him in through the employee side door. It’s just three. Big C, usually known as Cookie, the unknown punk, and Ash.

Ash is chowing down on donuts nervously.

Cookie gets up and extends out a hand and then turns it into an awkward hug. They don’t really know each other like that, but Jake accepts, surprisingly eager for physical touch.

“Are we waiting for anybody else? Who’d you share this with?”

“I don’t fucking know, I told Ash and Sydney and Sydney said she told her band, but like I don’t trust them to—”

“Hey! Mitch is cool.”

“Yeah, sure, Mitch is cool, I’m just saying I don’t trust them to not tell someone random, you know.”

“Jesus,” says the punk Jake doesn’t know, looking out the cracked open employee door.

“What?!”

“It’s Zoe. She’s down the street but she’s coming this way.”

Some shared glances. No one wants to let Zoe in.

“Well, let her in.”

Half an hour later, the tiny donut store backroom is swampy with seven nervous anarchists, Ethan included.

“What are we fucking doing?”

“Besides running and hiding?”

“I say we make distractions, make them feel like they got the wrong folks. They’re not the threat.”

“So what? They’ve already grabbed everyone. It’s not like they’re gonna let them go to get us instead. They’ll just keep them detained and then use all their resources on the few of us. Naw, last thing we need to do right now is remind them they didn’t get all of us.”

“To what fucking end. Solidarity means attack.”

“Look, if you can think of some way to bust people out, I’m all for it, but like, right now we can’t even keep ourselves safe. We bust people out, we have no way to house them. They’re raiding random totally apolitical squats, they just cleared the last houseless encampment near the airport.”

“Look, you can run and hide if you want, honestly, I mean that, I don’t judge, but I know if I was captured right now, the number one thing I’d want to see in the world would be cop cars on fire in the county jail parking lot.”

The meeting ends a couple hours later. They have sorted into two groups and a lone individual. One group will focus on risky active strikes. The other group will try to build an underground capable of keeping people safe.

Ash is going to run a clearinghouse email account to take submissions and push out notifications. Only people within the signed network of GPG keys. If they shut down her email, she’ll just pivot to a different one, using the same keys and sending to the same recipients. “They can’t shut down email wholesale, too much of capitalism runs on it.” She’ll try to maintain a public counterinfo site for certain announcements marked to be public, but no promises. Two of the punks present are going to be showed how to use GPG.

Jake and Ethan head out into the night. Ethan’s got a van they can sleep in.

Cat said Vera could stay as long as she needed, but they’ve never actually lived together before, and as the weeks go by, little frictions keep coming up. Vera forgot that she sided with the bandmate of Cat’s old boyfriend that one time, but Cat hasn’t. Cat doesn’t approve of the lengthy showers Vera takes. Vera had no idea Cat was such a morning person.

Normally, these would be nothing, but the isolation and background stress is taking a toll. Vera feels like it’s hard to keep her head together. Hard to be her.

Without the reference points of her normal life, she feels unmoored and frazzled. Always a step behind. Saying things she should have thought through more. Cat doesn’t have a Netflix account and Vera has nothing to do all day but pace around Cat’s basement and read Cat’s books.

Cat doesn’t use the internet much and Vera is trying not to suddenly flood Cat’s router with a ton of activity. Every morning, around the time Cat said she sometimes checks her work email, Vera takes the new laptop Cat bought for her and connects to the internet.

Insofar as the raids are getting attention, it seems to be mostly because some prominent journalist got detained too. It joins the background shrieking about journalists’ rights being under attack, but the news outlets mostly want to use that narrative to bolster their subscriptions.

With social media effectively gone, there’s little coverage of the mass detentions of anarchists, save some conservatives chortling that it was about time, and “See, the old establishment was deliberately choosing not to fight terrorism the whole time.”

She’s careful to build a profile of internet activity that doesn’t match her prior use. She chooses different websites for news, even to check weather reports. She doesn’t want to deviate too far from Cat’s previous activity. If Cat used Bing for searching about mushroom harvests, so will she. If Cat didn’t use an ad-blocker, she won’t add one. The goal is to slowly build up Cat’s internet usage so she can use it more frequently while stuck at home. She holds herself back from checking radical websites.

In the last three weeks, Vera has almost never left Cat’s house. One afternoon, there was an unusual car parked all day within view of the front door. Even Cat was convinced it was sketchy. Cat’s home cooking is very cumin-and-vegetables oriented, but she picks up the Thai food Vera loves a couple times with cash, not card.

Vera is hesitant about booting Tails off the USB she had on hand and connecting on the home network because she’s worried that will draw attention.

Instead, she gets Cat to go to a nearby café during the day and write down the Wi-Fi password. Then, in the middle of the night, she goes out with Cat’s crusty old laptop, sits behind the café’s dumpster, boots Tails, and connects to the open internet.

A lot of anarchist websites are gone, and the foreign ones are thin on substantive report-backs. Meaningful news or how-to guides are overshadowed by essays that triumphantly advocate one or another grotesque alliance and declare the time of principles to be over. This provokes, in turn, angry evocative screeds that fetishize death. To survive is a betrayal of our fallen, says one, it’s our duty to die beautifully together. Someone else is aggressively promoting a Patreon.

In her backup email account, there’s an encrypted message to her, signed by her old comrade Matthew. He survived the raids that got every other anarchist in their town and has taken formal sanctuary in the basement of a Quaker house. The cops seem to know he’s there, though, or at least suspect it. They keep a squad car parked out front at all hours and have followed the two old Quakers who come and go.

He’s heard from a friend who escaped the raids in another city and has been riding the rails. Matthew has a normie friend, a former movement lawyer who has fallen off the radar doing corporate work for a decade, but who he is certain would put his other friend up. It’s just that he’s got no way to contact him.

He has another friend who made it down across the southern border, but is penniless, needs a money transfer to get an apartment and look for a job. It could be cryptocurrency, even a mailed check… is it possible to get an anonymous money transfer?

When Cat gets home, Vera is ready with questions.

In the middle of the night, Julie and Maggie have to leave the farm. They drive out with six of their friends lying flat in the back of their truck, supplies and blankets packed on top of them. Every time they swerve around a bend on a back road and see headlights, they flinch, waiting to see if it is the cops or the local militia who promised to kill all of them.

The sudden collapse of two major cities from back-to-back environmental disasters has killed thousands, but it has also resulted in the establishment of an immense internal refugee camp in the south. The rumor is that the authorities can’t demand ID there because so many people have lost theirs.

There are enough white people in the vast camp, with enough friends and family outside, that it looks unlikely they will be purged, like so many immigrants had been, if they just keep their stories straight and avoid speaking with an accent. They should be safer there than at the farm where they have lived for the last year.

The roads are too chaotic, the internal border checkpoints too overwhelmed. The eight of them make it south intact. They buy Taco Bell and donuts along the way.

When they get to the camp, the armed guards shake them down, pilfering whatever they think might be of value.

From the shoddy posters everywhere, they quickly discover there are out “leftists” in the sprawling camp—the kind that want to be an armed gang and won’t countenance any “organizing” that isn’t under their umbrella. Every few weeks, one of them ends up dead, and it’s rarely from the guards or conservatives.

The better relief organizations are all fatigued and thin on resources. They keep getting squeezed out by Christian groups and political organizations looking to gain contracts or legitimacy. It’s unclear to what extent this is the ruler’s acolytes cannibalizing a Federal project in an orgy of corruption and to what extent the powers that be are deliberately inflicting pressure on the refugees. Buses with corporate branding on the sides promise quick work contracts to those in the camps. People come back bone-weary, but they do come back through the security cordons and fencing that surrounds the camp. The ruler brags that this program is finally providing jobs for real citizens.

It’s said that Amazon is restructuring its national supply chain to center around the concentrated cheap labor that the refugee camp provides.

Julie and Maggie keep their heads down, forming a tight circle with their friends from the farm. When administrators try to split them up into separate tracts of tin sheds, they find a way to meet up again.

When the guards took their jewelry and cash, they left them their bulk filtration system, chemical water purifying tabs, and beaten laptop. These turn out to be worth more than gems within the camp. Being able to purify gallons of water every day makes their crew self-sufficient.

What remains of the internet in the rest of the nation isn’t much to speak of, but there’s almost nothing in the camp besides a single app that takes over your phone, charges you dearly, and pronounces news headlines from a single source.

Julie and Maggie ignore phones entirely, sticking to Maggie’s Casio watch and their laptop. They disable the Wi-Fi on it and pretend it is just for showing pirated shows. Electrical power is available in the camp for a hefty charge, but folks rig up DIY tin-can and magnet turbines in the river that can recharge batteries if you wait long enough.

Once you’re in the camp, you can’t leave, but smugglers promise to get letters or even packages to and from the outside world. Rumor has it that many of them steal whatever you entrust to them and turn anything incriminating over to the cops for rewards.

Julie and Maggie have signed GPG keys with everyone they lived with at the farm, and those who didn’t flee with them to the camps are now vital relays to a wider network. The uncle of the three girls they saved has left the adjoining farm to join up with family further east. His white father’s name and address is above suspicion, so far.

They operate a rudimentary onion network, mailing USBs out with the smugglers. First they encrypt a message to the final recipient, then they encrypt that encrypted message plus a note about how to relay it to them to a friend, like the uncle. This encrypted file they hide as a malformed gif file among other memes and similar junk of the sort that is passed around the internal refugee camp. If the smugglers or anyone else inspect the USB on its way to the uncle, they just see some memes and a broken gif. It’s crude, and not every message makes it, but enough do.

Soon enough, Julie and Maggie are writing reports on the camps that are getting to anarchist journalists and infosites in other countries.

One of the companies that oversees the camp’s most hated enforcement drones gets its supply lines attacked in the Mediterranean. The CTO is assassinated at a gala.

When news reaches the camp, even conservative grannies who are always on about racist conspiracy theories are suddenly praising “those anarchists.”

A communiqué from distant comrades makes its way back through a laborious series of USB exchange. Solidarity, it reads, means attack.

Attack

It’s actually pretty hard to live in the forest. Jake and Ethan knew it would be when they drove their van far off an abandoned logging road and began burying it with dirt and branches to avoid detection by overhead drones.

But they couldn’t live in the city anymore. Not after the attack on city hall.

Every night, they laugh about the video of the supposedly “progressive” mayor—the one who had approved the executions of so many of their friends in black sites or ditches screaming as he emerged from the burning ruins.

“Every night we are still alive to cherish this is a gift,” they tell each other. It makes freezing on a punctured air mattress and throwing centipedes out of their bedding a little more tolerable.

Before they had escaped the city in their increasingly suspect van, stencils had started appearing of the dying mayor’s face on the news reel. Printed underneath was NO PITY.

Food is a problem, though. They rapidly pick the surrounding valleys clean of dandelions, miners’ lettuce, chickweed, and blackberries. After they almost get caught raiding a dumpster for something with calories in it, they realize they need a better system.

Once a month, they make their way through the forest to the outer suburbs of the city. Cookie leaves two plastic bags of food and stove gas canisters for them to pick up in a forested nook just outside an army graveyard. Peanut butter, chocolate, granola, olive oil, instant rice, chili. Sometimes, there’s also a book or a boardgame. There’s never any T for Ethan, though; it’s impossible to get hormones for anyone these days.

Back at the buried van, they carefully ration their laptop use, laboriously rebuilding battery charge from a damaged solar panel. They only hook up to the Baofeng radio at specific times. With email effectively banned, Ash is now running communication bursts in the region via radio. About once a week, she bikes out to random locations around the edge of the city and fires off a blast of noise over ham radio before taking off. A few drones now circle the city taking pictures, triangulating her signal each time she sends it. She’s in a race against time with them.

This noise is encrypted, of course, and decrypted via private keys now shared by a wider set of anarchist survivors. Each communication burst includes the time of the next burst, though not the place. Jake and Ethan connect their radio to a program on their laptop each time, waiting to read and decrypt.

Most nights, it’s just news from the wider world, ferried in via underground networks. Warnings of systematic sweeps planned for certain neighborhoods or local highways being closed by militias.

But one night, it’s something new.

The ruler of the new regime is coming for a photo op. They’re going to drag out one of the comrades kept alive from the original raids and execute her as the mastermind of the attack on City Hall.

There will be a ton of security.

But maybe not enough for six different shooters.

It’s dangerous to keep connecting to the Wi-Fi in the middle of the night at the same café, so Vera rotates cafés, making sure that Cat doesn’t get the Wi-Fi password on the same days and doesn’t bring a phone or device when she does go.

With Tor blocked, Vera knows that every time she uses the internet at a café to check sketchy websites it’s a signal to the authorities there’s a radical still running around her town. She tries not to check sketchy websites the same nights at the same cafés where she checks the backup email account she’s been using to message with Matthew. She writes most of her emails ahead of time to minimize time on the ground. No more than three minutes connected, then back into the night. The cops could catch her if they really put resources into it, but she’s banking on their laziness.

Then one day her emails are blocked. All email seems to be blocked. There’s new ID legislation that’s gone into place?

This is the last night Vera goes out to a café.

But by that point, she’s already helped build a relay network across town.

Every Monday, Matthew hands a USB to one of his Quaker hosts, who slips it down the side of a bench while sipping coffee in a park. Cat checks the side of the same bench a couple hours later and brings it home to Vera, who decrypts it. Relay points and drop spots now exist across town because Matthew’s efforts to rope in the former movement lawyer have succeeded. Now there are two anarchists hiding out on the lam from other cities in his house. One lives in the attic. The other has changed her hair color, removed some piercings, added a full face of makeup, and is working a job under the table.

A month ago, they helped relay the complete archives of a major anarchist collection that had supposedly been purged from a university. It went south with an anarchist backpacking a long mountain trail. Hard drives with copies of the collection are now squirreled away in various places.

Another anarchist that their new network loosely knows has set up a hidden camp on an island in the river, taking a little hidden canoe back and forth into a national park in the wee hours once a week and getting supplies. Cat and the lawyer are finding ways to slip an extra hundred a month to him.

Conservatives have been screaming about demolishing the Little Libraries on people’s lawns because liberals stuck a few banned books in them. They have no idea that Vera’s network uses them as flags to notify couriers about drops. A pulp sci-fi book with spine turned inward placed on top in a certain Little Library means to surreptitiously pick up a USB from a Burger King bag in a trash can down the street. They’re getting a whole system going.

Vera doesn’t need to know the network beyond her immediate circles. With her preexisting GPG public keys for certain distant comrades, she can just send encrypted messages with a distant city as a public destination and wait for couriers and swaps to copy and circulate it until her recipient can decrypt it. Messages get lost, but some get through. Through the network, distant strangers trade tips and tricks they have learned keeping their own local networks up.

With so much of the internet down, normies have started engaging in wider swap networks for saved files. “It’s almost like the libs are making their own little really really free markets.” It doesn’t matter that Cat doesn’t have a Netflix account, because now Vera has access to every show once torrented by local nerds. She keeps the new laptop that accepts such USBs air-gapped from everything else. Even if it’s not the shows she’d prefer, Vera can watch TV again.

Having something to do—knowing they can make a difference helping other anarchists—has Cat and Vera in a much better mood. Their city is a locus point in an emerging national underground railroad. That friend of Matthew’s south of the border that Cat sent cash to? He has a job now, and his apartment is packed with anarchists who have survived the dangerous trek across the border.

They still have the internet down there!

As Vera’s little sneaker net develops, folks begin to loop in around the edges—certain liberals from the pirate networks who have proven they can be trusted, at least with some things, at least to help relay GPG messages. One of the liberals in the network finds a way to tap into the credit card reader communications network and sneak packages of information back and forth with a programmer friend in another country.

When the Quaker house is raided and Matthew is summarily shot inside, it hardly breaks anyone’s stride.

And soon enough the network of safehouses and dead drop couriers is so well established that a subsection of it can risk moving not just people and money but guns.

Julie holds the wound closed while Maggie applies the glue, a contraband gift slipped into the camp via their smuggler friends. The fallen striker is cursing up a storm, but at least he’s not fainting.

Where’s that blasted Red Cross worker?

The crowd around them isn’t howling or chanting, they’re just jumping up and down in waves, a tactic somehow revived from decades ago in Apartheid South Africa. It makes the earth seem to shiver and shift—an avalanche of people, a force of nature. The usually sandy ground of the camp is already muddy with the rains of the flash flood. All the jumping makes it squelch in a way that adds up to something like the roar of the ocean.

This is it. More bullets are going to fly. But the guards don’t have enough and the camp knows it.

The gangs have disappeared. The leftists who talked endlessly about a mass strike are nowhere to be seen. The rune-tattooed fascists who work hand in hand with the guards are magically gone, too. A scrawny white boy who usually proudly hawks black market items is beating his chest wildly as he jumps alongside the grizzled Latina dyke who drives the aid workers around.

Maggie’s Casio watch is beeping with some irrelevant reminder. Their mud-soaked dog is jumping excitedly too, deciding the vast crowd is playing a game with her. Maybe the three of them will survive this, too.

If that video of the ruler’s photo-op that was smuggled in is to be believed, anything is possible.

“They Can’t Beat All of Us” : A Reportback from the Florida Abolitionist Gathering

2025-03-15T22:58:00Z

The banner at the Civic Media Center welcoming participants to the 2025 Florida Abolitionist Gathering.

From February 28 to March 2, hundreds of abolitionists and anarchists from across the country converged in Gainesville for the first Florida Abolitionist Gathering (FAG). Across a passionate weekend of workshops, films, food, debate, ritual, and protest, the contours of a robust regional resistance movement came into focus. The intergenerational, heavily queer and trans, and strongly multi-issue and anarchist group of abolitionists that converged in Florida articulated an expansive vision of liberation anchored in the urgent need to dismantle the prison-industrial complex in all its manifestations. The gathering showed that even as liberals wring their hands about the death of democracy, scrappy groups of organizers continue to fight back—and sometimes win—deep within the belly of the beast.

An Uphill Battle

Even within the darkening landscape of hyper-policing, anti-immigrant crackdowns, racist backlash, and transphobia spreading across the US, Florida poses a particularly chilling context. Despite his conflicts with Donald Trump, popular conservative governor Ron DeSantis has led a vicious campaign against activists in the state for years, prefiguring the national MAGA obsession with pushing back against all things “woke.” The notorious 2021 HB1 law passed in the aftermath of the Justice for George Floyd uprisings dramatically expanded the definition of a “riot” and the charges that can be levied against protesters, made toppling statues a felony, and limited the liability of anyone who injures or kills protesters, among other appalling provisions. The power of developers continues to surge, resulting in rollbacks of environmental protections and further reductions in affordable housing, while punitive policies criminalizing homelessness have led to sweeps of parks. As poverty and harsh laws sweep more and more people into jails and prisons, the conditions inside have worsened. New policies have ended physical mail delivery in most facilities and nearly succeeded in eliminating in-person visits, while DeSantis has called in the National Guard to staff prisons.

Suffice it to say: in Florida, abolitionists face an uphill battle.

Yet the state also features a robust array of resistance movements, including a strong anarchist presence, which have long pushed back against environmental destruction, gentrification, xenophobia, and mass incarceration. The Earth First! Journal was based in Lake Worth, Florida for some years, and active EF! chapters along with groups such as Fight Toxic Prisons have fought campaigns against ecocidal developers and prison profiteers. Protesters have targeted the headquarters of the GEO Group, a major private prison company; the Lake Worth-based Prison Legal News collects and circulates a wide range of information on prisoner rights.

In 2020, outside organizers concerned about the horrifying conditions facing prisoners during the COVID pandemic launched the Community Hotline for Incarcerated People in South Florida, documenting abuses and offering support to hundreds through legal referrals, advocacy, and protest. A mass demonstration in Tallahassee memorialized people who died in Florida prisons in the pandemic, featuring the testimony of a person whose father died from COVID-19 in prison and the laying of body bags in front of the state capitol building.

Gainesville in particular has been the site of powerful abolitionist activism in recent years. Campaigns by Florida Prisoner Solidarity successfully forced the termination of prison labor contracts with the city and county in 2018, effectively closing the Gainesville Work Camp facility; in 2023, in response to activist pressure, the Alachua County Jail became the first in the South to offer free unlimited phone calls to prisoners.

Last year, local organizers agreed that something needed to happen to mobilize against rising fascism in the state and nationally. They proposed a gathering that would bring together abolitionists and anarchists to network and share strategies. While many solidarity groups and campaigns operate in Florida, the geography of the state is so spread out that organizers from different regions may rarely have the chance to connect and collaborate. This gathering offered a chance to bring these far-flung radicals together while keeping the spotlight on prison solidarity organizing, which can often be ignored in broader progressive activist spaces.

Tabling materials at the 2025 Florida Abolitionist Gathering.

The Gathering

The Civic Media Center (CMC) served as the home base for the 2025 Florida Abolitionist Gathering. One of the longest-lasting radical community spaces still operating in the US, the CMC emerged from the global justice and Indymedia movements of a previous anarchist generation. Since its founding in 1993, the space has offered an alternative library, reading room, and infoshop, hosted events in support of grassroots activism, and featured do-it-yourself music and cultural events. In addition to the CMC, organizers partnered with other local art spaces and the public library to ensure that they could accommodate a wide range of workshops and activities. It’s a good thing they did, because over two hundred participants thronged the gathering over the course of the weekend, filling most event spaces to capacity and spilling out into countless discussions in the CMC’s outside courtyard, in a nearby park, and elsewhere across the city.

The gathering’s provocative acronym reflected the centrality of queer/trans organizers, participants, and topics. As we’ve observed on an international level, newer generations drawn to anarchist activity are disproportionately gender/sexual outlaws as well as political radicals; that pattern was very much in evidence in Gainesville.

Tablers such as the Pansy Collective and Queers for Climate Justice offered queer/trans merch and perspectives. Sessions took place over the weekend on producing hormones for do-it-yourself HRT and herbal transition options, a prison book luncheon hosted by the Tranzmission Prison Project on strategizing to get queer content into prisons, a participatory poetry workshop on “writing the queer/trans body,” and a presentation on “Radical Queer Histories of Faggotry, Abolition, and Anarchy.” The Alyssa Rodriguez Center for Gender Justice, an organization dedicated to strengthening movements for gender justice across prison walls, fighting gender-based violence, and eliminating barriers to political participation for incarcerated survivors and other grassroots advocates, presented on the experiences of trans people in Florida DOC facilities and spoke about coalition organizing around reproductive justice and bodily autonomy within and beyond prisons. At a time of intensifying gender fascism, as the right increasingly demonizes trans people, restricts access to abortion, and excuses male sexual violence, it was encouraging to see abolitionist organizers foregrounding struggles for gender self-determination in the movement to end prisons.

This intersectional logic informed a wide range of activities at the gathering. Presenters emphasized connections between varied struggles in workshops on Palestinian political prisoners, immigrant solidarity and anti-deportation efforts, and the environmental impact of jails and prisons. The final event on the program involved the screening of Can’t Stop Change, a new documentary film connecting stories from “LGBTQ2S+ artists, organizers, and educators across Florida (and the new Florida diaspora) into an intersectional climate justice narrative.”

The weekend showed that today’s abolitionists see prisoner support and prison abolition movements as inseparably linked to a wide range of liberation struggles and can confidently articulate the links between them as they build solidarity.

The specific context of Florida and the Southeast informed many presentations. The workshops included a teach-in on the oppression of Haiti and Haitian migrants, and its role within US empire; perspectives on Appalachian anti-capitalist and abolitionist organizing from the mine wars to mountaintop removal; the bail fund and hurricane relief mutual aid efforts in Asheville, North Carolina; and campaigns against new prison construction across the region by Fight Toxic Prisons. One especially interesting presentation by Root Legal, a South Florida nonprofit public interest law firm and community organizing project oriented towards addressing root causes of harm, shared their efforts to forge an abolitionist strategy working with “crime victims” to reject pressure from prosecutors to pursue criminal punishment.

An innovative cultural project launched by the South Florida Community Hotline for Incarcerated People (CHIP) has produced “Bending the Bars”, a full album of original hip-hop written and recorded entirely by musicians inside the jails and prisons of Broward County, Florida. Despite a complete ban on in-person visits and severe restrictions on costly phone calls, outside supporters collaborated with a wide range of incarcerated rappers to produce a powerful musical effort that defies the state’s efforts to isolate and silence prisoners. This was one of many examples on offer of how ferocious, creative, and effective abolitionist organizing can thrive in unexpected places.

While local and regional efforts remained in the spotlight, on Saturday evening, attendees took inspiration from struggles in other territories. Many participants were relieved at the recent release of Leonard Peltier after nearly fifty years incarcerated on charges stemming from his participation in the American Indian Movement’s struggle for Indigenous self-determination. A longtime Florida supporter of political prisoners offered an emotional presentation on the significance of his case to prison movements; some older organizers recalled being radicalized by Peltier’s case decades ago, and despairing of ever seeing him freed in their lifetimes. After viewing a short video of Leonard addressing a crowd of supporters near his home in so-called North Dakota, the assembled abolitionists recorded a wildly enthusiastic cheer and message of support and solidarity, which was sent to Peltier through his supporters.

Afterwards, a large group viewed the recent CrimethInc. documentary Fell in Love With Fire, an anarchist account of the revolutionary uprising that swept through Chile from October 2019 to March 2020. Amid a weekend of sharing strategies for fighting back against an array of miserable conditions, it was electrifying to hear the stories of the Chilean revolt as a reminder that revolutionary possibilities exist in the here and now, that courageous mass defiance can dramatically alter the social consensus in a short period of time, and that the future is unwritten.

Participants at the gathering showed a passionate interest not only in supporting prisoners and dismantling existing carceral facilities but also in critically rethinking the alternative ways our communities respond to harm. An evocative image appearing on stickers and t-shirts insisted, “Abolish All Carceral Logics,” illustrating the grip that our prison society can exert on our minds and hearts as well as our bodies.

One of the weekend’s most widely discussed workshops was titled “Against Me Too: Against Survivor Politics,” which waded into the waters of controversy around efforts to respond to harm within radical communities via community accountability processes. The conversation proved so generative that when the session ended, participants agreed to convene a second time on Sunday to continue the dialogues that had begun. At a time when liberals commonly repurpose the MAGA chant “Lock Them/Him Up!” at spaces ranging from the Democratic National Convention to a rally to defend trans history at Stonewall, it is critical that those of us fighting for total freedom reject the creep of carceral logic into our own approaches to social transformation.

Anarchists have long critically reflected on our small-scale efforts to redress harm outside of criminal legal processes. The many discussions that unspooled within and beyond these workshops confirmed that a new generation of anarchists and abolitionists continue to debate how to dismantle patriarchy and keep each other safe outside of the ineffective and punitive approaches put forward by the state.

On the last afternoon of the gathering, a well-attended caucus of non-white attendees met and shared experiences of navigating the gathering and broader organizing spaces. In the collective debrief session following, caucus participants shared a range of feedback about their experiences, critiquing the predominant whiteness of the gathering and asserting the importance of more autonomous spaces for non-white organizers to connect. While participants diverged in their perspectives of the weekend, many agreed that both the caucus space and the public debrief circle at the close of the gatherings schedule were key features that other gatherings should reproduce. In both autonomous organizing and critical participation in majority white efforts, Black, brown, and Indigenous attendees made clear that their perspectives are integral to effective movements for abolition and liberation. Other suggestions offered toward future gatherings included increased intergenerational spaces, sessions rooting us into the place we gather in and its local context, and expanding the variety of modalities for learning, sharing, and action.

Friday evening’s grief ritual offered one of the weekend’s most moving moments. The assembled participants shared a painfully long list of names of fellow organizers and loved ones who had died in recent years, adding them to a board that would eventually be composted, symbolizing their return to the earth to continue nourishing and fertilizing a new generation of resistance. One participant sung a song to honor Tortuguita, an anarchist murdered by police while defending the Weelaunee Forest in the movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta.

At the ritual and in several workshops across the weekend, participants honored the memory of Karen Smith, a prolific outside organizer who has been mourned by her comrades on both sides of the walls since her tragic death in a car accident in 2020. As a recently incarcerated organizer recalled, “She gave her heart, her mind, and her life to this movement.” Despite the intense grief and demoralization so many radicals feel amid personal losses and political defeats, the ritual showed the capacity of our radical movements to rebuild our resilience by honoring our departed comrades and sharing deeply with each other.

The altar created by FAG 2025 participants during the grief ritual commemorating our departed comrades.

The Power of Inside/Outside Organizing: Julius’s Story

In one of the weekend’s most powerful sessions, two Florida outside abolitionists joined Julius, one of the lead incarcerated organizers of the 2016 national prison strike in Florida, to discuss inside/outside resistance to the Florida Department of Corrections to a packed room of 75 attendees at the public library. After spending over seventeen years in Florida prisons since being sentenced as a teenager, Julius had just been released the previous month. In a particularly moving moment, a south Florida anarchist organizer arrived and approached Julius at the table; as it turned out, the two had been corresponding and organizing together for years, but had never before been able to meet in person. Their emotional embrace with tears in their eyes showed concretely the powerful bonds that can be forged through solidarity across prison walls.

Julius shared his perspectives on how becoming involved in inside/outside solidarity organizing since 2016 transformed his life. He traced his political development over his years inside, acknowledging the shame he felt about his past actions of stealing from other poor people from his own community and misogynistic behavior. While accepting responsibility for harm he caused, he explained that his sentence involved “no recognition of what I’ve been through, or the context that shaped me.” Receiving mail from outside organizers helped him reinterpret his experiences through a political lens, and as momentum built toward the national prison strike, he decided to go all in. He used his own scarce commissary funds to photocopy and circulate materials about the strike, and built relationships with prisoners who were widely respected whose influence could help ensure wider participation. His efforts paid off: at his facility, 90% of the prisoners participated in hunger strikes or sit-down work strikes. Florida prisons kicked off the strike nationally, launching in a dozen facilities two days before the scheduled date and startling Florida Deportment of Corrections officials.

Like other vocal strikers, Julius was targeted by the prison administration with made-up infractions and arbitrary transfers to other facilities in an attempt to hamper his organizing. Yet their strategy backfired. Although the authorities bounced him around to five different facilities in retaliation, Julius gleefully recounted, “I could reach five times as many people with the message as I could have if they’d just left me there.” But outside pressure proved instrumental to offsetting the consequences prison officials can inflict on inside organizers with near impunity. “That’s why your voices are so important,” Julius explained, “because they can’t tell you to shut the fuck up, pepper spray you, and throw you in a cell.”

Julius reiterated a lesson that incarcerated organizers have long emphasized: receiving mail, phone calls, visits, and commissary donations from outside supporters demonstrates to both prison officials and fellow prisoners that an inside organizer has support and cannot be subjected to abuse or isolation without consequences. Achieving a critical mass of both participation inside and support outside provides the only way to win victories and protect organizers, he explained: “They might catch us individually, but they can’t beat all of us.”

Prison was a harrowing experience, and adjusting to life on the outside for the first time in nearly two decades hasn’t been easy, Julius acknowledged. Small things could trigger his PTSD, from the jangle of keys (signifying the approach of guards) to the squeak of shoes on a basketball court (the soundscape of a fight or stabbing). But the organizing that changed his life inside has also transformed his notion of what could be possible in his life outside. The positive thing he’s taken from his seventeen years in Florida’s hellish prisons is the network he formed with other abolitionists—“It’s you comrades who are the inspiration.”

Alongside Julius’s powerful in-person testimony, panelists shared audio recordings of messages from two additional inside organizers who are still currently incarcerated. Their testimony—interrupted by the mechanical voice intoning “you have one minute remaining” that is so familiar to organizers—reminded attendees of the absence of the countless thousands of comrades who remain held captive behind the walls.

In a poignant moment, Julius explained that across nearly two decades behind the walls, his biggest fear was “dying alone in prison without my voice ever being heard.” The panel showed how organizers can amplify those voices, strengthening movements for solidarity and abolition and overcoming the state’s efforts to bury people alive.

Materials for participants at the gathering to write to prisoners.

From Discussion to Action: Protest and Mutual Aid

At the panel discussion, Julius had explained the powerful impact that noise demonstrations outside prisons and jails can have: “That gets their attention, I promise you!” So it was appropriate that the weekend concluded with a demonstration outside the Gainesville Work Camp, a prison focused on extracting prisoner labor that has recently reopened after activists successfully shut it down several years before. About twenty-five participants from the gathering held a spirited rally, making noise and chanting to let officials know that the exploitation of local prisoners did not go unnoticed.

A particularly feisty child of perhaps ten years old who had attended much of the gathering provided a highlight, getting on the bullhorn and chanting, “Oink oink, piggy piggy / We’re gonna make your lives shitty!”

As the demonstration concluded with a chant of “We love you, we see you / We won’t be free without you,” a group of incarcerated workers could be seen waving. One organizer described it as the best part of the gathering: “After a weekend of talking about solidarity, then being in it.”

The demonstration at the Work Farm prison in Gainesville.

In addition to the demonstration, the weekend’s cultural events raised a significant sum of money for a variety of solidarity projects. A show one evening benefited Florida Prisoner Solidarity’s support efforts, while proceeds from a rave helped the Gainesville Books to Prisoners program and mutual aid efforts in Gaza and Sudan. In particular, money raised throughout the FAG weekend successfully funded a water well in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, which is now supplying 300-400 families, enabling them to resist Israeli colonial forces seeking to displace them. The relationships of solidarity that were strengthened this weekend transcended apartheid walls and national borders as well as prison walls.

The Florida Abolitionist Gathering showed the outlines of a fierce and broad movement against prisons and the world that creates them, anchored in an anarchist vision of total liberation. In the difficult times ahead, we can find strength in remembering that prisoners in the most horrific conditions have sustained their determination through the power of solidarity—and that every one of us can play a role in fighting back as we build towards a world free of prisons and all forms of exploitation and oppression.

To learn more or get involved:

Florida Abolitionist Gathering – also check out their Instagram (T-shirts from the gathering are still available, in case you missed it!)
Want to host the next Abolitionist Gathering in your area? Whether you’re from Georgia (GAG), South Carolina (SCAG), Louisiana (LAG), or somewhere else in the region that makes for an even worse acronym, you can reach out to the organizers through the links above.

Organizations:

Civic Media Center (CMC)
Florida Prisoner Solidarity
Fight Toxic Prisons
South Florida Community Hotline for Incarcerated People (CHIP)
“Bending the Bars” – hip hop album by incarcerated musicians from Florida
Root Legal
The Alyssa Rodriguez Center for Gender Justice
Florida Institutional Legal Services Project](https://www.floridalegal.org/)
Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP)
Oakland Abolition and Solidarity

Films:

Cop City Is Everywhere : Learning from the Movement to Defend the Forest

2025-03-14T02:48:22Z

The movement to stop Cop City and defend Weelaunee Forest was one of the most important social struggles of the Biden era. Its trajectory tells us a lot about the challenges we confront today under Donald Trump. In the final chapter of our chronology, we trace the movement’s concluding phase, beginning in 2023 and ending with Trump’s arrival in power, and explore what we can learn from it.

You can consult a timeline of events in the appendix.

In the wake of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020, politicians and profiteers in Atlanta set out to create a compound in which to train police to use militarized force to suppress protest activity. In response, a movement emerged to defend Weelaunee Forest, the forest slated for destruction to make way for the training facility known as Cop City. This movement picked up where the George Floyd rebellion left off, seeking to channel widespread anger against police violence into a campaign mobilizing a wide range of people and tactics against a concrete target.

Over the following three and a half years, this movement gave rise to one of the fiercest struggles of the Biden era. Opponents of Cop City repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction project. In response, the authorities killed one forest defender and distributed outlandish terrorism and racketeering charges charges at random. While the movement became so broadly popular that the government of Atlanta was forced to use a variety of strategies to prevent voters from participating in a referendum on Cop City, politicians across the political spectrum unified in favor of pouring a virtually unlimited quantity of public funds into the coffers of the police and their allies.

The arrival of the second Trump era has vindicated the decision to focus on resisting police militarization. Every repressive policy that Trump decrees will be imposed by police and other state mercenaries. The opposition that emerged in Atlanta sets the template for the social struggles that will play out under the second Trump administration. On one side, a political class unified in favor of repression unhampered by precedent or law; on the other side, a popular movement involving many different elements of the population using a wide array of tactics and strategies.

This makes the lessons of the fight to stop Cop City essential reading for all.

The movement to Stop Cop City was exemplary in several ways.

First, the movement began from the premise that victory might be within reach. Although they were taking on powerful adversaries, the participants in the movement did not take it for granted that they would lose. Rather than simply setting out to make a gesture, they began from the premise that it was possible to achieve a concrete change in society—or at least, that they had a responsibility to discover whether it was possible through ambitious action. They set concrete goals and experimented with a variety of strategies to achieve them.

Second, the participants did not water down their politics or tactics out of a misguided desire to appeal to a broad range of people. The George Floyd uprising, which began with the burning of a police precinct, demonstrated that boldness and a radical analysis can be at least as galvanizing as a timid approach calculated to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Finally, the participants set out to create a movement that was both popular and combative. Rather than accepting a role on the margins, they asserted direct action and the aim of abolishing the police as core to the movement. They made a point of articulating their intentions clearly and accessibly, making them known far and wide, with the goal of welcoming as many people as possible into a movement aiming to enact profound change.

If every movement began from these points of departure, it seems likely that many of them would succeed.

In the United States today, the wealthiest members of the ruling class control hundreds of billions of dollars apiece, while tens of millions of people struggle to put food on the table. The impossible task of imposing this state of affairs on an increasingly restless population is left to the police. Without police, politicians and executives would not be safe for an instant, as recent events have demonstrated.

In this context, it is not surprising that the authorities threw every resource at their disposal into imposing Cop City on Atlanta, freely shedding blood and violating their own laws in the process. In the Biden era, this sufficed to overcome resistance to the project, because a large part of the population remained aloof from the movement, retaining faith in democracy and the rule of law. As we enter the second Trump era, however—which is already characterized by the abandonment of all compromise and the erosion of whatever perceived legitimacy state institutions still possessed—no one will be able to stand aside from social struggles for long.

In view of this, the most important question is not whether the movement achieved its express goals, but how its legacy will equip people for the next round of struggles. At the minimum, it has helped to clarify the complicity of the entire political class in the violence of the police while setting important precedents for movement solidarity and diversity of tactics.

“From the border to Weelaunee and Palestine, we defend life.”

Already, the confrontations between those who seek to militarize the police and those who aspire to create a world without domination have spread from Atlanta all around the country.

In 2022, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources announced that the National Guard training center at Camp Grayling sought to take over an additional 162,000 acres of publicly-owned land, more than doubling the area under its control. Inspired by the example of the movement to Stop Cop City, protesters mobilized against this expansion. In the end, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources was compelled to reject the original request, instead offering 52,000 acres to the military via short-term use permits.

In the Bay Area, anarchists launched a movement to oppose a “Cop Campus” in San Pablo, California. In Charlotte, North Carolina, locals initiated a campaign targeting the construction of a local Cop City project. Even where resistance does not immediately emerge, building these facilities could prove difficult in a climate of widespread opposition: in East Somerville, South Carolina, developers scrapped their contract to build a new police training center in favor of building condos on the valuable real estate slated for development.

As the US government increasingly emulates carceral states like El Salvador, stopping these facilities may be among the principle responsibilities of revolutionary movements. But whether it is a question of opposing police militarization, standing up for housing and the environment, or preserving public health, the same dynamics that emerged in the fight over Cop City will come to characterize more and more social conflicts.

Cop City is everywhere. Our resistance must be, as well.

This is the concluding chapter of our chronology of the movement. You can read the earlier installments here:

“The City in the Forest,” chronicles the first year of the movement.
“The Forest in the City,” chronicles the second year of the movement.
“Beneath the Concrete, the Forest” collects first-person accounts from the occupation of Weelaunee forest through the first half of 2022.
“Balance Sheet,” explores and evaluates the strategies that different currents in the movement have employed.
“Living in an Earthquake” chronicles February through June of 2023, including the fifth week of action, the repression that followed, and the City Hall mobilizations.
“Don’t Stop: Continuing the Fight against Cop City” chronicles the movement’s fortunes through the second half of 2023, including the Block Cop City mobilization.

To Pick up Where We Left Off

In the previous chapter, we discussed the Block Cop City mobilization and some of its immediate consequences, including the burning of sixteen Ernst Concrete trucks that same night, which led to the company’s departure from the project.

In November 2023, mobilizing in response to the RICO charges against 61 people in late summer was a bold move. Only 500 people showed up, partly due to warnings from nonprofit staffers and activist groups—liberals and anarchists alike—about how “dangerous” the action would be. Despite this, no participants were arrested, a significant achievement for a movement that has often seen riot police tackle elderly picketers.

After Block Cop City, autonomous groups organized around two new efforts. One idea, a nationwide convergence outside Georgia, emerged during the sixth week of action, alongside the Block Cop City proposal. The other followed the anniversary of Tortuguita’s death.

The Day of the Forest Defender

On January 2, 2024, anonymous authors published a statement titled “The Day of the Forest Defender,” which circulated widely online and in print. The statement briefly described the January 18, 2023 killing of Tortuguita by Georgia State Patrol and proposed a permanent commemoration of that day through resistance. The authors drew parallels to global commemorations, including Black August (honoring George and Jonathan Jackson), The Day of the Young Combatant (March 29, remembering Rafael and Eduardo Vergara Toledo’s deaths fighting the Pinochet regime in Chile), November 17th (commemorating the 1973 Polytechnic University revolt in Greece), and December 6th (marking the 2008 police killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos and the subsequent insurrection in Greece).

The statement called for January 18 to be recognized as a day for actions, workshops, vigils, and other events honoring Tortuguita and all those who have died defending the Earth. It emphasized that movements in the United States must confront the repression targeting the Stop Cop City movement and respond with ongoing acts of resistance beyond just supporting those facing charges.

As the anniversary approached, it became clear the government sought to assassinate Tortuguita’s character, as Tortuguita had become a martyr for the movement. Attorney General John Fowler filed a cynical motion to include excerpts from Tort’s journal in the RICO discovery, claiming it contained evidence relevant to the case against other activists. Filing this motion made the private journal a public record, and right-wing commentators spread what they considered to be shocking quotations across the internet and television.

In the end, the court denied that motion, but the journal’s contents had already been digitized and published. The public saw notes from Food Not Bombs meetings, fragmentary thoughts, jokes, scattered remarks, abbreviated lists, dates, and drawings. Among these were instances of hyperbole, anti-police humor, and iconography, the kind of thoughts shared by millions of young people across the country. None of the leaked material scandalized the movement. We may never know how the television-viewing public perceived the coverage at that time, as many simply adopt the most recent perspective they hear. In any case, the news outlets and their audiences did not have the final word on the killing of a 26-year-old anarchist.

On January 16, two days before the Day of the Forest Defender, a feller-buncher was set on fire in Weelaunee Forest. This machinery was burned at the forest’s edge near Interstate 20, on a parcel of land owned by Shadowbox Studios. The online communiqué reaffirmed the movement’s commitment to this section of the forest and highlighted the continued vulnerability of the developers to sabotage, despite the $41,500-per-day security budget allocated by the Atlanta city government to protect the construction site. In acting early, the saboteurs presumably hoped to set the tone for the days to follow.

After the action, the government announced it had spent $20 million on security for the project, bringing the total cost to $110 million. This figure excluded the damages incurred by private contractors but included increases in insurance premiums.

On January 18, Day of the Forest Defender events drew a total of over 1000 participants across approximately fifty locations. Vigils, rallies, movie screenings, and marches took place in cities including Seattle, Portland, Corvallis, Boise, Arcata, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Pablo, Stanford, Sacramento, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Tucson, Lincoln, Denver, Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Columbus, Akron, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Carbondale, Minneapolis, Lansing, Pontiac, Richmond, New Orleans, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Savannah, Tallahassee, Miami, Asheville, Chapel Hill, DC, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Binghamton, Bridgeport, New York, London, Berlin, and Atlanta. There was an event in Rojava, as well.

That night, anonymous groups carried out acts of vandalism and sabotage. In Atlanta, anarchists broke windows at two Nationwide Insurance subsidiaries. In San Francisco, activists smashed eighteen windows at the Police Credit Union. In Novi, Michigan, caltrops were placed at the driveway of MTU Solutions. Elsewhere, windows were etched with corrosive chemicals.

Anarchists overseas also conducted invite-only actions, reflecting global sympathy for the movement and its sacrifices. In Hanover, Germany, anarchists burned an Autobahn GmbH. In Amsterdam, saboteurs slashed the tires of UPS trucks, a Police Foundation funder. In northern England, activists raided a chicken farm and liberated the animals. The communiques for all of these actions referenced Tortuguita.

As tragedies pile up, movements for liberation must focus on rigorous, ongoing education. Without it, they will remain trapped in cycles of short-lived outrage, unable to build lasting movements, organizations, or projects. The Day of the Forest Defender could serve as an opportunity for education, clarifying important lessons for years to come. If it succeeds, future activists will be able to learn from our struggles and mistakes, just as the movement against Cop City draws inspiration from past struggles.

Day of the Forest Defender demonstration in Berkeley, California on January 18, 2024.

The Stakes Keep Going Up

The Day of the Forest Defender reinvigorated networks in Atlanta and beyond. On January 25, activists burned four machines owned by Brent Scarborough Company at a construction site on Boulevard Drive, near Custer Avenue.

Four days later, on January 29, activists rushed onto a Brasfield & Gorrie jobsite in Midtown (at 12th and Juniper) and locked themselves to construction equipment. Dozens of supporters gathered at ground level, halting construction for several hours. Two people were arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing. Could this method become a new approach for forest defenders fighting Cop City? It seemed to spark enthusiasm among a new layer of activists who were committed to resisting Cop City even after the clearing of the forest.

Before this approach could be tested further, events took a drastic turn with severe consequences for the movement—and perhaps for all movements in the near future.

Machines belonging to Brent Scarborough burned on Boulevard Drive. The company was repeatedly targeted for their contract with Brasfield & Gorrie to build Cop City.

February 8: Coordinated Raids Across Southeast Atlanta

At 6 am on February 8, hundreds of police officers, federal agents, and state patrolmen raided three houses simultaneously. This was not the first time they had worked together to raid a home. But it was the first time they had targeted multiple houses at once within context of the movement.

Two homes in Lakewood Heights were near recent acts of arson and sabotage targeting Brent Scarborough Company. The third, in Starlight Heights, was a few hundred feet from the Cop City construction site. The raids followed a joint investigation by the Atlanta Police, FBI, and ATF. The APEX Unit led the raid at one Lakewood home, the ATF at another, and the FBI at the Starlight Heights residence, with support from the Georgia State Patrol and Bureau of Investigations.

At the house raided by the APEX Unit, a helicopter hovered overhead as officers arrived in armored vehicles. Wearing balaclavas, brandishing long guns, and obscuring their name tags, they pounded on the door. One resident, hands raised, opened the door before it was broken, possibly avoiding gunfire. Another resident, topless, was dragged outside despite asking for a shirt. Masked plainclothes officers photographed detainees on their phones. Neighbors filmed and shouted at the officers. Inside, police overturned furniture, punched holes in walls, and ransacked the house. They seized t-shirts, laptops, a camera, and phones. One resident was detained for eight hours at police headquarters; agents photographed his tattoos but did not interrogate him before releasing him without charges.

APEX Unit of the Atlanta Police blocking a residential street in Lakewood Heights after conducting a raid on a single-family home.

At the house that the FBI raided, dozens of agents arrived and loudly announced themselves. Those inside were permitted to sit while agents searched through the shelves, cabinets, books, and cushions. The intruders seized some phones, but made no arrests. The agents combed through belongings with meticulous care, avoiding errors or oversights.

At the ATF raid, agents surrounded the house, shining flashlights and barking orders. They detained the residents of a backyard unit and broke down the front door of the main house, throwing flash-bang grenades inside. The agents abused residents and destroyed belongings, dragging one person down the porch stairs by their hair and staging intimate photographs in order to humiliate the residents. They arrested one person on charges of First-Degree Arson, later accusing them of involvement in the June 2023 attack on a police training facility in which eight police motorcycles were burned using time-delayed devices.

Unlike the 2023 raid on the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, the targets of this massive operation were not public figures. They were not known to the media, did not face RICO charges, and could not easily express what connected their situation to the broader movement. Setting aside concerns about why the police decided to target these individuals, the movement’s ability to rally support was uncertain. When the police raided the Solidarity Fund, activists, journalists, and even politicians spoke out in their defense. Who would come to the aid of accused terrorists and arsonists?

“Bless Them”

Before the end of February 8, the movement responded boldly. The Stop Cop City Vote Coalition (the group organizing the referendum campaign), Emory Stop Cop City, and others called an emergency press conference at the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters. As a result, the Police Foundation—which had been vandalized during the first Week of Action in 2021 and again after Tortuguita’s killing in 2023—sent all staff home early.

During the press conference, public figures associated with the movement spoke out, condemning the repression and asserting that it was not just an attack on the fight to stop Cop City, but an assault on everyone’s right to organize and resist social injustices. This would have sufficed to counter the media narrative that the police chief had attempted to craft with his self-assured, misguided statements earlier that day. But the organizers went further. When a journalist asked if the pro-referendum coalition condemned the burning of police motorcycles—the act the police cited as justification for the raids—a prominent local activist associated with the Movement for Black Lives answered:

“Hell no. No. Not at all. And if I’m being completely honest with you, Atlanta deserves even more than that. Real talk. They are lucky. This city is lucky. This country is lucky. Atlanta has its hands in literally murdering Palestinians right now. You think we give a damn about some equipment? Not at all. Not at all. But some of us cannot take that risk. But those who can? Bless them. Bless them. I cannot take that risk. But Lord knows I’ll sit with my lighter and be like ‘damn.’ But the best thing I can do is use my voice, use my feet, use my heart, talk to my people, and organize. And I’ll put my body on the line and show up and do as much as I can. Because we need every, every means necessary to deal with the police state we are dealing with. So I don’t care. No! And I would imagine my comrades would feel the same. No! We are not gonna condemn nobody for doing righteously what they need to do when our city has silenced every ‘proper democratic process.’ As one of the students says: ‘If we can’t get this in the courts, if we can’t get this in the council, then we are going to take it to the streets!’ Because our people, our children, my babies, are worth the risk.”

In the days following the raids, others worked to demonstrate that both the principle of solidarity and the spirit of resistance remained intact despite the intensifying repression.

Press conference, downtown Atlanta, February 8, 2024.

Trading Blows

In the early morning of February 10, anarchists in St. Paul set fire to two Home Depot trucks and the trailers carrying expensive lumber. A claim of responsibility posted online expressed support for the individual arrested in the raids and quoted the “March 5th Movement” communiqué accompanying the action that the arrestee was accused of participating in: “The time has come to destroy those who destroy the Earth.”

That same night, in Lakewood Heights—the location of two of the raids—a police cruiser was set on fire. The car was parked outside a cop’s home. An anonymous statement published online with the action read:

“We wish to dispel any notion that people will take this latest wave of repression lying down…We all have something to lose; it is simply a matter of living out our beliefs or submitting to the police state. Inaction is a choice just as much as action, and we all have to live with the choices we make.”

This act targeting a police officer at home, shortly after a major operation, sent authorities into a spiral they wouldn’t recover from for nearly six months.

By mid-morning on February 10, Lakewood Heights was effectively under occupation. Local, state, and federal agencies laid siege to the area. Police cruisers lined highway off-ramps, intersections, and major streets. An armored vehicle was stationed on Jonesboro Road, a key street in the neighborhood. A helicopter circled overhead for days. Unmarked cruisers sped through the area, parking outside the homes of suspected “militant anarchists” (in the words of Chief Shierbaum), tailing individuals, photographing them, pulling over motorists, and asking pointless questions. The GBI, FBI, and ATF canvassed door-to-door, dug through trash cans, and paraded K-9 units through the community.

Around 4 pm, dozens of police vehicles gathered at Kipp Vision Elementary on McWilliams Street, marking the southern border of the Lakewood neighborhood. They drove north several blocks, shut down roads, and established a perimeter around a single-family home. After kicking in the front and back doors and finding no one inside, they ransacked the place—flipping over chairs and tables, pulling posters off walls, and breaking furniture. Finding nothing of interest, they left as quickly as they had come.

Outside, Chief Shierbaum addressed the media. With nothing to show for the raid, he focused on the burned police cruiser, absurdly claiming that “someone could have died.” Though he admitted no one was home at the time, he claimed that police had targeted the house based on a “preliminary investigation” suggesting the arsonists might have returned there after setting the cruiser on fire. He ended his press conference ominously: “The person we were looking for knows who he is,” and that the police would like to speak with him.

In a courageous countermove, the resident of this home held his own press conference the next day. He asserted that he was targeted not for any crimes, but because of his support for the movement. He refused to yield to leading questions from journalists, who tried to imply he had prior knowledge of attacks on Cop City. Instead of denouncing the attacks, he maintained that it was the police who had created the dangerous conditions, not anarchists. At the end of the conference, he invited journalists into his home to show them the damage from the raid.

Had more community members responded this way, publicly asserting their unity and refusal to accept raids and harassment of activists, the following months might have played out differently.

Faith leaders denounce the repression of Cop City protesters.

From a Distance

If there had been no militant response to the raids, the government might well have carried out more raids and arrests, something they had explicitly stated was in the works. Politicians and police often fail to make good on their promises. Possibly, the authorities thought they would find evidence in the course of their raids that they did not find. Perhaps they expended too much political favor kicking in so many doors for so few arrests. Both could be true. The courage of the responses from the movement probably impacted the situation as well.

Movements that fail to respond swiftly to attacks often lose morale. It is a significant weakness only to be able to advance with the consent of one’s adversary. At the same time, movements should resist the temptation to get caught in high-risk grudge matches, boxing themselves in ever-shrinking fields of action that involve fewer and fewer participants. This applies to everyone, not just those who burn police cruisers.

In the weeks following the raids, the movement stalled. There was no systematic canvassing of the besieged area, nor were large demonstrations organized to denounce the raids. Local engagement was missing precisely when it was crucial. While many recognized the need to mobilize in such a way, many key figures in the movement were in retreat—intimidated by police drones, unmarked vans, or still out on bond from their felony RICO charges. To have been able to seize this missed opportunity, the movement would have required broader participation, more people prepared to take initiative, and greater support from the wider community. Perhaps this was a “chicken and egg” dilemma.

One advantage the movement had long held over the Atlanta Police Foundation was the ability to stage interventions outside of the forest, outside the city, outside the state of Georgia. Convergences allow movements to remain focused and precise, drawing together many of the movement’s most dedicated participants and supporters. Decentralized action makes the movement more agile, resilient, and capable of replenishing its ranks, since organizers can introduce new participants to the movement far from the epicenter of repression.

What if these two strengths could be combined, converging far from the center of surveillance and intimidation?

Nationwide Summit against Cop City

By the second week of February, police cruisers began parking outside the homes of more than a dozen Atlanta residents, day and night. According to local media reports and The Guardian, officers parked their cars, shined floodlights, and generally created an air of menace in Lakewood Heights and southeast Atlanta. Between mid-February and early September 2024, officers parked outside these homes up to ten times a day. This amounted to well over a thousand instances of overt surveillance against alleged participants in the movement and their neighbors.

Even before the February raids and subsequent harassment, opponents of Cop City began organizing a nationwide convergence in Tucson, Arizona. This marked the first large-scale attempt to mobilize forest defenders and anti-Cop City activists outside of Atlanta in the three years of resistance to the project. After the inconclusive events the previous November, this was a creative innovation worth pursuing. If the movement could catalyze participation on a larger scale by cultivating centers of participation further from the epicenter of repression, it might give itself a new lease on life and continue deploying both confrontational and participatory means.

On February 23, just weeks after the raids in Atlanta, hundreds of people converged in Tucson. They gathered at Mansfield Park, exchanging food, pamphlets, schedules, and embraces. For those who had participated in previous weeks of action in the Weelaunee Forest, this scene was familiar—though this time, without helicopters overhead.

In the late afternoon, 150 forest defenders marched from the park to a nearby lot that had been abandoned by developers and authorities; they transformed it into a temporary autonomous zone. Participants redecorated the lot with graffiti, tents, and folding tables. Workshops, presentations, and skill-shares drew several hundred more people over the next few days. For those who had traveled from afar, the warm Arizona night was likely a pleasant surprise.

That evening, away from the reclaimed plaza, an anonymous group smashed windows at three Nationwide Insurance locations. The weekend had officially begun. Around one hundred people slept beneath the Tucson sky.

Generations of Resistance

On Saturday, February 24, local residents and seasoned anarchists intermingled all day long in strategy sessions, workshops, and assemblies about the movement and the challenges it faced.

That afternoon, Ben Morea, of the legendary New York City anarchist groups Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAW/MF), addressed 75 people in a corner of Mansfield Park, sharing the lessons he had learned as a lifelong rebel against all authority, domination, and closed-mindedness. Young participants asked him questions and received heartfelt responses.

The movement against Cop City and to defend Weelaunee Forest has benefitted from its continuous cross-pollination with autonomous and unruly youth subcultures. It has also benefitted from the participation of elders, movement veterans, and seniors who offer their own perspective and insights on the world, with the wisdom of many decades of hard-earned lessons and experiences.

That night, a few hundred people gathered at a nearby community arts space for a hardcore punk show organized within the context of the convergence. Anarchists distributed pamphlets and posters about the movement, while punk bands played fast and angry music into the late hours of the night.

In Santa Cruz, California, a Nationwide subsidiary was vandalized with spray paint, its locks glued shut.

New Ambitions, Old Templates

On Sunday, February 25, 80 people gathered in downtown Tucson, dressed in black clothing and masks. The crowd had apparently assembled on an invitation-only basis. They marched toward the Presidio Plaza, down Stone Street; some began smashing windows. The sound of hammers and stones colliding with glass rang through the night. Masked protesters smashed the plate glass windows at a Wells Fargo. Paint fumes drifted into the air, rising above the glimmering wreckage. PNC Bank shared the same fate.

A few police cruisers confronted the crowd. Hooded protesters responded, lobbing stones and fireworks, sending the officers into retreat. The crowd circled back to Presidio Plaza before dispersing. Pairs of protesters sprinted in different directions. Sirens wailed in the distance. Within minutes, the crowd vanished, just as police flooded the area. Three pedestrians were arrested and charged with felonies. Later, the charges were dropped.

PNC Bank on Stone Avenue redecorated by protesters.

This demonstration echoed the march on the APF headquarters in Atlanta during the first Week of Action, when the movement still lacked mass sympathy but possessed the element of surprise. It also recalled a specific type of protest undertaken by US anarchists between 2007 and 2011—small affinity group actions that exploited the element of surprise and mimicked the energy of a riot, albeit on a smaller scale. The most infamous example was the May 1, 2010 vandalism of a gentrifying shopping area in Asheville, North Carolina, followed by the arrests of eleven people, facing felony charges and bond amounts of $65,000 each.

Such demonstrations are risky. The crowds involved are often too small to effectively repel police incursions, leaving stragglers and passersby vulnerable to snatch squads. Moreover, these actions are often ignored or misrepresented by the media, and because they’re not destructive enough to warrant widespread attention, their broader political or social impact is negligible—at least, in terms of public perception. However, the February 25 demonstration was accompanied by a press release, which ensured extensive media coverage. Though the worst consequences were avoided, it appeared that this demonstration neither galvanized nor demoralized the movement. In that regard, its impact on the movement was more similar to Block Cop City than to the January 21, 2023 black bloc or the March 5, 2023 raid on Cop City.

One might wonder if the risk was worth it, given the lack of tangible results. If nothing else, considering the context, it was remarkable that so many people were willing to take part in such actions just weeks after the recent raids in Atlanta. Arguably, the virtues and courage that movement participants are able to embody for one another are more important than what they communicate to their adversaries. Perhaps the networks that enable these actions are more durable than those that rely solely on other tactics. In that case, it is the relationships and organization of those networks that gives them strength, not risk tolerance or bravado alone.

Windows broken at the Stone Avenue Wells Fargo during the “Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City” in Tucson, Arizona.

From Scottsdale to New York City

The next day, as media outlets published dramatic images of broken glass from the night before, dozens of protesters gathered at the Nationwide Insurance headquarters in Scottsdale, two hours from Tucson. Armed with poster-board signs and whistles, they faced off against hundreds of police officers. The office was closed, the entire area under heavy police surveillance. Law enforcement clearly expected a militant confrontation at the office building, but the office itself was tucked away in an office park far from the city center, easily policed. The few protesters who gathered there, undeterred, courageously faced down the absurd overreaction of the police.

Meanwhile, in Forest Hills, Arizona, six activists locked themselves into concrete-filled barrels blocking the entrance to a gated community housing a regional executive of Nationwide Insurance. With only a few journalists and medics for support, they successfully shut down access to the wealthy community for hours. During that time, they explained their actions to the neighbors of the Nationwide executive.

At the same time, in New York City, over two hundred people marched to AXA XL and Nationwide offices. AXA XL insures Brasfield & Gorrie, the contractor behind Cop City, while Nationwide insures the Atlanta Police Foundation. The crowd surged into the building, pushing past police and security. They flooded the atrium and stairwells, dropping banners from the second-floor balconies as their chants echoed through the halls. It was the largest demonstration against Cop City to take place outside Atlanta. The next day, several Nationwide offices in New York City were vandalized. The day after that, someone slashed the tires of ten NYPD cruisers in an expression of solidarity with the movement.

These actions in Arizona and New York illustrated the relationship between participatory and clandestine tactics, as the Weeks of Action in Atlanta often led to greater sabotage against those destroying the forest.

Scottsdale, Arizona, February 26, 2024.

Spring into Resistance

By March 2024, a new round of actions against Cop City were in full swing. The weekly picket at the construction site, established over the winter, continued to grow as temperatures rose. On March 5, the anniversary of the historic raid on the Cop City site, around 20 Black women gathered at Mayor Andre Dickens’ private residence at 6 a.m. They held banners, chanted slogans, and delivered speeches condemning the repression of the movement and demanding the city unblock the referendum process in order to permit residents to vote on the land-lease ordinance.

Two days later, on March 7, another activist locked down to construction equipment at a Brasfield & Gorrie worksite in Midtown. A crowd gathered outside with megaphones and banners, just as they had during the January lockdown at a nearby construction site. After several hours, the forest defender was removed by police and cited for misdemeanor “trespassing.”

At the same time, authorities continued extensive surveillance and harassment in Lakewood and southeast Atlanta.

On March 11, a crowd of Austin residents confronted Mayor Dickens while he was participating in a panel at the South by Southwest music event. As Dickens began his speech, protesters unfurled banners, hurled insults at him, and chanted “Viva, Viva, Tortuguita” while throwing fliers into the air. The event was ruined. In a desperate attempt to shield himself, Dickens called out, “Look at who is doing this,” cynically using identity politics to deflect from his responsibility for the harm occurring in Atlanta. The disruption continued, and Dickens was heckled all the way out of the building.

Three days later, on March 14, eight machines owned by Brent Scarborough were set ablaze in a suburb south of Atlanta. Anonymous saboteurs issued a statement online, highlighting the lack of coverage surrounding the attack. They argued that while actions in the city often prompted police statements and media coverage, news of attacks in the suburbs was generally suppressed. This may have been the most destructive act against Brent Scarborough yet.

What Goes Up…

As the movement regained its footing after the February raids, new activists flocked to meetings, fundraisers, and direct action trainings. This led to more daring actions. Two activists climbed a 250-foot crane at a Brasfield & Gorrie construction site in Midtown Atlanta. Unlike previous lockdowns, which involved small groups stalling work for a few hours, this action was riskier and posed a serious challenge to security. After several hours, police scaled the crane and used an angle grinder to capture the activists, who had locked their arms inside a steel pipe.

The courts reacted harshly, charging the two with “False Imprisonment,” a felony kidnapping charge. The police claimed the crane operator, on the ground, was “unable to leave” due to the activists suspended nearly 20 stories above him.

This absurd charge gave pause to many. If camping in a forest, passing out fliers, civil disobedience, breaking windows, and rioting were all punished with the same severity, what actions remained for those unwilling to risk imprisonment? What would it take to stop the construction?

A Stop Cop City protester locked down to Brasfield & Gorrie construction equipment in Midtown Atlanta in March 2024.

From Weelaunee to Gaza

At the same time, across the Atlantic, the Israeli invasion of Gaza continued. Graphic images and reports arrived daily showing the brutal toll on Palestinian civilians. Horrific footage recorded and broadcast by Palestinians depicted scenes of unimaginable violence. Soldiers decapitated children. Fighter jets vaporized hospital wards. Aid workers shoveled human remains into trash bags to turn them over to loved ones.

For six months, protesters in the United States blocked highways, disrupted speaking events, shut down ports. While often small, these actions were passionate and contributed to growing momentum. On April 15, coordinated highway blockades took place around the country. Two days later, a group at Columbia University in New York established a protest camp. When the administration brought the NYPD in to attack students and faculty, outrage spread across the country. By the third week of April, protesters had established or attempted to establish “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” at over a hundred campuses.

Atlanta was no different. On April 22, an anonymous group wheatpasted slogans around Emory University, linking the institution with Cop City and the Israeli occupation.

On April 25, dozens of protesters rushed onto Emory’s Quad at 7:30 am, erecting tents and banners that read “No Cop City,” “No Genocide,” and “Defend the Forest.” Protesters were able to assemble tents, but not much else. At 10:15, protesters attempted to march but were blocked by officers who fired pepper balls. Riot police used rubber bullets and batons. In the chaos, medics were tackled, journalists maced, and professors arrested.

“Divest from death—no Cop City, no genocide.” A banner raised at the Emory University Gaza Solidarity Encampment in April 2024.

While the police reasserted control of the Quad, students rushed from classrooms, eager to witness—and join—the unfolding conflict.

By 11:30 am, nearly 500 people had gathered around Emory’s Quad. A group surrounded the Atlanta Police cruisers holding detainees from the earlier chaos. The crowd chanted, “Every city is Cop City.” Tensions flared as the cruisers tried to leave and protesters rushed into the road to block their exit. Police fired pepper balls into the crowd and tackled another student. People poured out of nearby classrooms, pushing closer to the police lines while chanting, “Shame on you.” In the standoff, snatch squads arrested several more protesters. The crowd then swarmed to de-arrest them, hitting and shoving officers, successfully freeing at least one person. Some began throwing bottles. The cruisers left and the crowd marched toward Convocation Hall.

Students, community members, faculty, clergy, and activists then reconvened in the Quad. Supporters brought food to the protesters, who gathered in small groups to discuss their next steps. At least 28 people had been arrested and many others were injured. Though the police were absent, those assembled were uncertain how to proceed.

Word spread that students at the Candler Theology School had occupied the atrium and were calling for supporters to join them. Around 300 people headed to the school. By the time they arrived, police had blocked the doors to prevent an occupation. Masked protesters with reinforced banners pressed into the police lines, throwing bottles and signs in an attempt to break through. For the third time, police fired pepper balls at the crowd, sending many running or retreating from the building.

Despite the efforts of a few dozen who tried to push through, the larger crowd lacked the will to confront the police directly. Had they been more unified and prepared, they likely could have seized the building. Instead, exhausted and underprepared, the crowd—still several hundred strong—retreated to the Quad.

Around 9:15 pm, most protesters dispersed, anticipating the 11 pm campus curfew.

Between us and peace, a line of police officers. Clashes outside Emory Candler School of Theology.

No Confidence

The next day, 500 people reconvened in Emory’s Quad following an autonomous call to action circulated anonymously online. The flier outlined two demands: divest from Israel and the Atlanta Police Foundation, and drop all charges against those arrested in the previous day’s protests. As the crowd gathered, students and activists delivered impassioned speeches on a megaphone, connecting the fight against Cop City to broader issues like US imperialism in Palestine and systemic racism.

After an hour of speeches, the crowd marched toward Cox Hall. A few protesters forced open the doors and hundreds poured inside, chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Stop Cop City.” The atmosphere was upbeat but cautious—there was no immediate threat of arrest, but most participants quickly retreated to the Quad after the brief transgression.

Representatives from the “Open Expression” committee—the Orwellian name of the group that the university established to monitor protests under the guise of “protecting rights”—warned the crowd that if protesters set up camp or took over a building, the police would be called. They claimed that, because someone had painted “Escalate 4 Gaza” on a bathroom mirror, the entire event was at risk of forced dispersal. These mediators exerted significant influence over the movement; on April 26, they effectively neutralized momentum, discouraging further action.

As the hours passed, hundreds lingered in the Quad, blasting music and socializing, before dispersing by the 11 pm curfew.

Go Where They Go

Amid nationwide protests, on April 27, the Atlanta Police Department hosted a recruitment event in New York City. In August 2023, forest defenders had disrupted a similar event, blocking the doors and throwing buckets of shrimp into the convention center atrium. Protesters sought to disrupt this event as well. The evening before, someone poured fast-drying cement into the Marriott Hotel’s toilets, repeatedly flushing them to mix it with the water. This presumably caused extensive damage to the plumbing. Activists also covered the courtyard with posters of Tortuguita and graffiti denouncing Cop City. The next day, anonymous activists released 300 crickets into the building and pulled the fire alarm. The event was ruined once again.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Emory President Greg Fenves sent an email warning students and faculty about dangerous “outsiders” supposedly spreading violence and vandalism at protests. His rhetoric aimed to divide campus affiliates from the broader Atlanta community to better control dissent. When someone spray-painted the word “genocide” on a campus building, Fenves condemned it as “hateful.”

While the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published opinion pieces claiming that Palestine solidarity protests were at risk of being “co-opted” by activists seeking to stop Cop City, activists from Arcata, Los Angeles, New York City, Tucson, Richmond, and New Orleans drew explicit connections between the two struggles, emphasizing the link between US military operations and domestic policing.

Despite the attempts to undermine the protests, including the outrageous ruling from the internal conduct board that found protesters had “violated” the rights of Open Expressions the previous fall, public sentiment remained firmly opposed to the repression. Nearly all of the 28 arrestees from April 25 were Emory students, faculty, or alumni, undermining allegations about outside agitators.

On April 28, hundreds gathered again in the Quad. Faculty and students announced their intention to hold a “No Confidence” vote against President Fenves for summoning the Atlanta Police Department to arrest and abuse protesters. The vote resulted in a 75% supermajority against Fenves and the administration.

A Defend the Forest / Stop Cop City banner at the Gaza solidarity encampment at Emory. These are the alleged “outside agitators” described by President Greg Fenves.

Breaking and Exiting

Protests across the country escalated, with dramatic confrontations between protesters and police. Scenes of police beating and gassing students, alongside moments of protesters linking arms and overpowering police encirclement tactics, inspired many. On May Day, around 300 people gathered once again at Emory, carrying reinforced banners.

For the third time that week, protesters flooded into a building, this time filling the atrium of the Undergraduate Admission Bookstore. To hold the building, participants would have had to broadcast their intentions to stay; some people would have needed to barricade doors with tables, chairs, and other obstacles. However, the crowd lacked unity and tactical direction. Representatives from Open Expressions again informed protesters that they would call the police if the action continued. With no clear plan to withstand a police response, the crowd dispersed, leaving the building unoccupied.

The Gaza Solidarity protests at Emory University had ended for the time being.

A demonstration at Emory Undergraduate Admissions, spring 2024.

Protest at GILEE

Since April 2021, activists have focused on the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program at Georgia State University. The program facilitates exchanges between metro Atlanta officers and Israeli police, sharing tactics for controlling marginalized communities. Some argue that GILEE’s training of US police in Israeli military tactics may have inspired the concept of Cop City.

On May 4, around one hundred people gathered at Hurt Park near Georgia State University and marched to the GILEE office at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. Upon arrival, protesters faced off with police at the front doors. Using reinforced banners as shields, they charged the police lines, hoping to enter the building. Police responded with batons and mace, but the protesters held their ground. After several minutes, recognizing that they couldn’t enter, and anticipating police reinforcements, they left together without arrests, showing the power of direct confrontation in the Gaza solidarity movement.

The next day, sixty protesters returned to Hurt Park. Surrounded by riot police, they held a meeting to discuss next steps before leaving without marching. Law enforcement, hoping for a confrontation, was left frustrated.

On May 6, Emory University moved its commencement ceremony off campus to Gwinnett County in hopes of avoiding disruption from Cop City/Gaza solidarity protests.

Yet as the semester ended, campus-based protests subsided nationwide. In Atlanta, eight months later, protests had not returned.

Protesters and police clash outside of GILEE headquarters in downtown Atlanta.

It’s Already Too Late

When movements lose the ability to innovate and set their own timelines, participants often convince themselves the pause is not politically risky. “Once the semester starts…,” they tell themselves. “After May Day…” or perhaps “After the election…” This mindset can signal a movement’s collapse. Patience and strategy are vital, but waiting on things to develop “organically” or on others’ timelines is generally a sign of stagnation. Bold action, audacity, and collective organization are essential to the pursuit of change.

As attention shifted from the forest to the city, the opportunities to take action expanded, in theory, even as the ability to take advantage of them contracted. The will to act had spread, but the vulnerabilities of the Cop City project were shrinking. Construction continued day and night, funded by contractors with deep personal and professional stakes in the Police Foundation. It began to appear that only a serious revolt could halt the project—if even that could. Across the country, mayors and local governments announced their own Cop City projects—in New York, Oakland, Nashville, Charlotte, and beyond.

In early June, autonomous groups within the Cop City and Gaza solidarity movements called for a joint action to disrupt the first Biden-Trump debate, which was scheduled to take place in Atlanta. The call encouraged people of all tendencies to act. If unrest could unfold outside electoral events, as it had in Costa Mesa, Albuquerque, and elsewhere in 2016, the fight against Cop City might expand its purchase upon the public imagination. Failing to do would mean consigning millions to passivity and spectatorship as the US power structure sought to monopolize their attention, narrowing the spectrum of political possibility to two elderly candidates who both sought to increase police funding and continue sending billions to Israel to fund the genocide in Gaza.

But catalyzing confrontations at a national security event was a tall order.

Rising Tension

The weeks leading up to the Presidential debate were eventful. Police harassment in Lakewood reached new heights. On May 29, The Guardian reported officers shining lights into residents’ homes, running sirens at random. In one instance, someone placed a lit traffic flare in a bush outside an activists’ home, sparking a fire.

Around this time, cameras appeared on the streetlights outside the houses that APEX and the ATF had raided. The camera outside the former was concealed in a metal box with black duct tape, peering through a tinted window at the home’s entrance. The box containing the other camera wasn’t covered in black duct tape, but simply labeled “High Voltage.” It resembled the devices placed outside the homes of several Memphis Black Lives Matter activists in 2018.

At the end of May, several water mains burst in Atlanta, cutting water access to large parts of the city, especially Black neighborhoods south of I-20 and west of the I-75/85 connector. The morning that the system failed, Mayor Dickens flew to Nashville for a fundraiser with wealthy elites and lobbyists. For nearly a week, tens of thousands of residents had only brown or murky water, and some in the southeastern parts of the city had no water whatsoever. On social media, many linked the water crisis to funding for Cop City.

As the geopolitical influence of the United States wanes and climate disasters worsen, such breakdowns will likely become more common. Unless we reclaim our resources from warmongers and police, social chaos will merge with catastrophe. It’s easy to anticipate the consequences, as desperate people are already experiencing the equivalent in many parts of the world.

New fronts of repression were opening further afield. In Charleston, South Carolina, federal agents surrounded a sedan on the interstate and forced it to pull over. The driver, a 20-year-old anarchist, was served with a subpoena for a federal grand jury investigation into the December 31, 2023, arrest of a person accused of painting anti-Cop City slogans on multiple Thomas Concrete trucks and setting them on fire.

On June 25, the legal team representing the Atlanta Solidarity Fund in the RICO case targeting the movement filed a motion in court. It revealed that local and federal law enforcement had mishandled confidential client-attorney communications, primarily emails. These were supposed to be processed by a third-party “filter team” to protect the rights of the accused, a process the defense had warned the prosecution about three times. As the trial approaches—dates still pending—more such violations are expected, as the charges against the movement are largely political rather than legal.

A camera on a light pole outside of a home raided by Georgia police. The metal box is covered in duct tape to obscure its similarity to a similar device installed on the same day at another house a few blocks away. The camera inside the plastic window is difficult to see with the naked eye, but can be seen clearly in this photograph.

The Presidential Debate

On June 27, several activists locked themselves to the entrance of Hudson Technologies in Smyrna, an Atlanta suburb within the I-285 perimeter highway. Hudson Technologies works with the Israeli Defense Forces; the activists were drawing attention to its role in the violence in Gaza. They also emphasized the right of Atlanta residents to participate in the popular referendum against Cop City. This was the third time that anti-war protesters had targeted Hudson. Earlier, on February 14, activists had glued the locks and spray-painted the building. On June 3, all the windows were broken in retaliation for the US-backed Israeli invasion of Rafah, a Gaza Strip area designated a “safe zone” for refugees.

Later that afternoon, protesters gathered in west Midtown, between Spring Street, the 17th Street bridge, Northside Drive, and south toward Home Park and Georgia Tech University. Advocates for affirmative action and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs stood on the 17th Street bridge. Nearly a hundred protesters, most of them Black, were surrounded by police separating them from a pro-Trump rally just fifty feet away. At the Israeli consulate on Spring Street, around a hundred socialists and anti-war activists gathered at 5 pm, chanting slogans and listening to speeches. Another demonstration was assembling in a small park in Home Park.

This group stood apart from the others. On Hemphill, 10th Street, and surrounding streets, helmeted police squads stood watch with bicycles in hand, their heads swiveling. Undercover vehicles crept down side streets, likely carrying federal agents. Atlanta Police vehicles and motorcycles blocked roads and shone their lights on sidewalks and intersections. Meanwhile, ninety people in black hoodies, face masks, keffiyehs, and helmets assembled near 10th and State in a green space. The sound system nearly drowned out the noise of helicopters overhead. As the sun began to set, many waited for others to arrive to begin the march. In the end, no one else came.

A few speakers delivered fiery speeches, grounding the crowd in the gravity of the moment and the need for militant action. Forty cops stood watch on the adjacent street, many just out of sight.

What could be done? With over a hundred people facing charges—61 of them under RICO—it’s easy to see why the crowd was small. Without the prospect of confronting a Cop City contractor, it was hard to grasp the stakes of the event, especially for those still focused on direct action rather than mass disorder. One could blame other groups for scheduling “competing” events at the same time, but would two hundred people have done what the boldest one hundred could not? Would one hundred people taking confrontational action elsewhere provide a real boost to resistance against the electoral farce or against Cop City? Probably not—unless they had breached the fortified construction site. The movement, like society at large, was being squeezed by immense forces it had yet to take the measure of.

After some deliberation, many of the brave individuals present determined that the demonstration they had hoped for was not feasible. They made the decision to march out of the park together and disperse. Following a brief standoff with police, the crowd managed to leave the controlled zone and exit the area without any arrests.

Perhaps unknowingly, the participants had arrived at the end of a movement trajectory.

At that very moment, as the debate reached living rooms around the country, everyone could see that by permitting the bureaucracy behind Joe Biden to maintain its ossified grip on power and siding with the forces of repression at every step, the Democrats had ceded the 2024 election to Trump and the future of America to a new breed of autocracy:

Suddenly, in the midst of Biden’s debate with Trump on June 27, it became inescapably obvious that their pragmatism was about to lose them the 2024 election, their only alibi for all the atrocities they had endorsed up to that point.

A new cycle was opening, even darker than the Biden era. The fight against Cop City had represented the best hope to continue the social movements of the first Trump era and the best chance to address the challenges they had confronted. The struggle reached an impasse at the same moment that the contours of the second Trump era came into focus:

“Every time we lose a battle, we are forced to fight it once more, but on worse terms.”

How Was the Movement Undermined?

As of March 2025, it appears that the movement to defend Weelaunee Forest and stop Cop City has been effectively neutralized. The pace of actions has stalled, and the kind of qualitative interventions that might spark new forms of resistance or mobilize additional communities have come to a halt. The petition for a referendum against the land lease remains mired in legal battles. Much of the forest has already been destroyed. Key support structures, including the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, are entangled in high-stakes litigation. Long-term participants have faced harassment, intimidation, and collective punishment. Direct action to isolate Brasfield & Gorrie subcontractors from the Atlanta Police Foundation no longer appears feasible.

Unless something unexpected were to happen to the heavily fortified facility itself, which is now nearing completion, the only remaining hope for the movement would be a mass uprising capable of shifting the balance of power from the police to the population at large. But there is currently no sign of such an uprising on the horizon.

How Did We Get Here?

In analyzing the repression of the movement, we must be careful not to attribute more insight, strategy, or strength to our adversaries than they actually possess. At the same time, we owe it to ourselves and to those who will come after us to honestly assess the limits and challenges the movement faced so that future movements can anticipate similar obstacles and overcome them.

This process can feel like studying a volcanic eruption: those with the clearest view risk perishing in the flames.

Isolation

From its inception in April 2021 until the murder of Tortuguita in January 2023, the movement remained remarkably small. While it’s difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the movement’s size, we can say that during this early period, all public marches, rallies, and demonstrations drew fewer than 175 participants. Concerts, raves, and other social events occasionally drew up to five hundred people to the forest, including a generator party along the banks of Intrenchment Creek during the first week of action in late summer 2021. At any given time, only a few dozen people maintained the encampments in the forest.

Why is this? The United States had just emerged from the most powerful social movement in living memory, involving millions of people protesting against police violence.

Non-participants are notoriously difficult to understand. Analyzing the Stop Cop City movement, it is hard to attribute its shortcomings to a lack of outreach, media coverage, or information sharing. For years, anarchists, abolitionists, and radicals implemented a comprehensive media strategy—conducting interviews, drafting press releases, and writing articles for a range of outlets from anonymous anarchist blogs to international media platforms. Organizers also directly contacted hundreds of thousands of people through face-to-face canvassing.

The anarchists at the core of the movement were aware of the risks involved in conducting a militant but isolated campaign. Significant strategizing went into addressing this challenge from the earliest weeks. Within the direct action wing of the movement, countless hours were devoted to developing frameworks that were both confrontational and accessible to those new to radical politics. The theory of escalation that the organizers shared held that only a mass uprising could pose a serious challenge to the police; the direct action campaign was intended to ignite this.

Why, in the wake of the 2020 revolt, did so many fail to rally to the struggle against a new police facility? How could so few engage in the fight to save a vital urban greenspace during an era of cataclysmic environmental collapse? This is difficult to grasp. But perhaps those aren’t the right questions. Maybe it’s not just a matter of awareness or political consistency.

Urban Sprawl

As of 2023, Atlanta’s population stands at just 520,000. Adding in the populations of its largest suburbs—DeKalb, Clayton, Cobb, and Gwinnett—the total rises to about 3.3 million, spread across 1300 square miles. That’s roughly 2500 people per square mile. The broader “Metropolitan Atlanta Area,” with its six million residents across 39 counties, spans a vast, mostly semi-rural expanse in a deeply conservative state. Most of these people live an hour or more from the city’s core. During rush hour (roughly 3 to 8 pm), some areas are nearly three hours away from the city limits. Consequently, we can’t realistically count all these millions as potential participants in a movement centered in Atlanta.

To grasp the functional population distribution of Atlanta’s “inner metro” area, it’s useful to compare it to cities like Tampa (2300 people per square mile), Indianapolis (2400), and Charlotte (3000). These cities are more similar in terms of urban density. When considering outreach programs, local participation in protest movements, and attendance at rallies, marches, or encampments, the most important factor is the will and enthusiasm of the public. That will is shaped by several factors including the difficulty of getting around, the city’s notorious traffic, its underdeveloped public transit, and the sprawling neighborhoods that keep people isolated within their specific quadrant of the city or the surrounding suburbs.

Consider the 2020 George Floyd protests. At their peak in late May and early June, only two or three protests drew more than five thousand people. Most barely exceeded one thousand. When residents clashed with police and burned down the Wendy’s on University Avenue after Rayshard Brooks was murdered that summer, the crowd likely did not exceed six or seven hundred. This is important when we consider the prospects for a mass protest movement in Atlanta and whether it could be driven by local residents. The same is true for many other cities across the United States, as most are not significantly denser than Atlanta.

“Spatial De-Concentration”

These conditions are neither neutral nor accidental. Atlanta was once a far denser city. In the early 20th century, streetcars carried workers and visitors through neighborhoods filled with brick townhomes, corner stores, and thriving industry. The first challenges to this dense, “walkable” urban core emerged in the 1920s and ’30s, when General Motors began dismantling streetcar lines and promoting cheap automobiles. However, after the summer of 1967, a year marked by open confrontations between Black youth and police across the US, the federal government took a special interest in this process. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, convened by the FBI, examined the causes and protagonists behind over three hundred rebellions against police across the country, especially in Newark and Detroit. At the end of their report, they recommended a drastic restructuring of cities, emphasizing “spatial deconcentration”—the deliberate dispersal of urban populations, particularly the Black working class.

In the 1970s and ’80s, this concept became a government mandate. The federal government poured billions of dollars into infrastructure, promoting the construction of interstate highways that cut through the heart of Black communities in cities like Atlanta, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration’s deregulatory policies gave a massive boost to the automobile and construction industries, enabling them to widen roads and expand freeways, while also outsourcing production overseas to regions with lower wages. These highways were not built in vacant lots—they ran straight through low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods, shattering communities and displacing families.

Black communities were gutted. Industry and jobs moved to the suburbs (or overseas), and white flight followed, leaving Black workers behind. As factories relocated and middle-class white families moved to the outskirts, the policy of “last hired, first fired” ensured that Black workers, already facing systemic discrimination, were the first to lose their jobs.

This was not simply poor urban planning. It was a deliberate reorganization of cities intended to decimate the urban core and reshape the economic landscape. The scars of that era continue to mark cities across America today.

The decision to build a movement that could draw in activists from outside Atlanta—indeed, from outside Georgia—was surely made with these considerations in mind, and for good reason. Still, the participation of out-of-towners was neither consistent nor decisive enough to halt the project. Local participants lacked the tactical leverage they needed; without the resources of national support, they were at a disadvantage. The authorities could concentrate local, state, and federal forces against the movement; only outside support could even the odds.

The government understood this. That’s why Allison Clark of the Community Stakeholders Advisory Committee, Michael Julian Bond of the Atlanta City Council, Police Chief Darin Schierbaum, Mayor Andre Dickens, and countless other proponents of Cop City sought to normalize a simple, devastating, repressive formula, encapsulated in one of their oft-repeated mantras:

“Traveling out of state to protest is a form of domestic terrorism.”

I-85, I-75, and I-20 all pass through the heart of downtown Atlanta, segregating the city into four quadrants.

The Spiral of Repression

As repression intensified, the movement lost its flexibility and capacity for innovation. After the City Council approved the project in fall 2021, one faction of the movement adopted a simple framework: defend the forest, pressure contractors to withdraw, and evade or repel police operations. But as police violence escalated and prosecutors leveled increasingly outrageous charges, the once vibrant and audacious movement faltered. It struggled to match the force of the state, especially after the killing of Tortuguita.

This was also evident in the difficulty of planning the next steps. There was no unifying strategy capable of addressing both the intensifying attacks of the state and the passive spectatorship of the wider public. The principle of “decentralization” did not suffice to resolve this problem.

Thousands considered themselves to be on the movement’s “front lines.” Between the first and fifth weeks of action, this perception was an asset, regardless of whether it was accurate. During those early months, generating widespread sympathy and engagement was a key priority. Organizing cultural events, mushroom walks, bike rides, and similar activities in the forest or across town played an important role in maintaining visibility and involvement.

After the police lost control of the forest following the July 2022 burning of Boyette Brothers equipment and the music festival during the Fourth Week of Action, the balance of forces shifted definitively in favor of the movement. For a brief period, it seemed theoretically possible that the movement could pursue more conventional tactics, such as mobilizing hundreds for a direct assault on the site—which at that time was still little more than a police staging area—or launching a mass encampment at the Prison Farm. However, what was theoretically viable was not always politically realistic. Who would have carried out such a raid at that time? How would they have been organized? Here, we see how tactical questions are always political questions.

Some well-intentioned commentators—many of them participants in the movement—have suggested that the movement contracted after Tortuguita was killed on January 18, 2023. On closer examination, this is simply not true. The movement grew significantly after Tortuguita’s death. The number of participants increased; the frequency, scale, and intensity of actions increased. These grew even more after the March 5, 2023 raid on the Cop City construction site. It is true that they did not increase enough to counterbalance the extent to which the state was concentrating force against the movement. It is also true that the tactics that had made the movement feel powerful for a small dedicated core became impossible after Tortuguita was killed. But the movement should not be reducible to the tactics of any specific group or tendency. Therefore, it cannot be argued categorically that the potential of or participation in the movement receded after the killing. The movement arguably reached its peak of participation in the summer of 2023, during the City Hall mobilizations. The period of lowest participation was actually in fall of 2022.

With this context in mind, we can see that the domestic terrorism arrests and the killing of Tortuguita were, in part, a consequence of low participation, not a cause of it. Tragically, fall 2022 was the moment when the movement had gained the greatest leverage against Cop City, as it had created a stalemate between forest defenders and police. To break that stalemate, city officials and law enforcement began spreading lies about protesters, labeling them “terrorists” and falsely claiming they had fired guns at contractors. In this way, they gradually built the political will to employ deadly force against the movement, as well as persuading state and federal authorities to get involved.

Some participants recognized this danger at the time. To maximize the leverage that the movement had gained against Cop City, many people concluded that they needed to expand the struggle as rapidly as possible. Their goal was to involve a large number of people in viable tactics that had the potential to halt the project. For some, this meant organizing community meals and concerts in the forest. Others focused on building infrastructure, such as cabins and warming stations, to encourage mass participation. These “place-makers,” if you will, organized around the idea of making the forest a place where people would want to spend time.

One of the structures built by the movement in Weelaunee People’s Park, also known as Intrenchment Creek Park.

The grassroots left had largely abandoned the movement, leaving it to anarchists to organize against Cop City. Punks, ravers, and artists contributed what they could, but their involvement was mostly peripheral. Some activists worked tirelessly to draw these communities deeper into the struggle, seeing them as potential key players who could fill in where the traditional left had fallen short.

Organizers of the weeks of action sought to mitigate the participation problem by drawing in large numbers of people for short periods of time.

By fall 2022, the actions that were needed were far beyond what the available forces could mobilize. While city officials and law enforcement sought to prepare the ground for lethal violence, the only ways for the movement to break the stalemate in its own favor would have been to mobilize massive numbers of people or deal a series of blows so devastating that they eroded the political will of those behind the project.

Yet only a handful of people were still circulating through the forest, mostly in the context of parties, plays, or concerts. Even fewer were focused on leveraging force against Cop City outside of the forest through demonstrations, blockades, or occupations. Those committed to direct action were not able to compensate for the absence of large numbers of people, as their tactics remained largely confined to hit-and-run acts of destruction, presumably necessitated by their own small numbers.

Those who lived in the forest faced difficult challenges. At times, some individuals behaved in ways that made it more difficult to solve problems, reconcile differences, and pursue shared goals. This also contributed to the isolation of the encampments.

The efforts of those involved in direct action outside the forest, those working on “place-making” efforts within the woods, and those curating cultural experiences that connected the forest with surrounding communities all plateaued.

Instead, as the pressure increased, the movement’s capacity for creative, sustained resistance dwindled. Early on, abolitionists argued that some environmentalists were less concerned with the police than with protecting “nature.” This tension was compounded by the fact that some of those temporarily living in the forest framed their interests as opposed to others, claiming parts of the forest as their “homes” and suggesting that weeks of actions, fundraisers, or protests were violating their personal space. In turn, some anarchists criticized others for lacking a sufficiently militant vision, accusing them of pushing for mere policy changes. Meanwhile, many working groups within the movement failed to prioritize the forest’s physical integrity, not realizing that once the trees were gone, it would be considerably more difficult to resist the construction of Cop City.

In the end, not enough participants pushed beyond their comfort zones. When their preferred tactics became too difficult, many stopped participating entirely, regardless of their stated objectives.

What If?

How could this story have turned out differently?¹

Let’s return to summer 2022, when the movement showed that it was too powerful for the local authorities to control. What if, at that moment, people around the country had organized a massive outreach campaign calling people to converge on Atlanta for a range of broadly confrontational and participatory actions?

All of this did in fact occur a full year later, in fall 2023, when several speaking tours crisscrossed the United States promoting the Block Cop City mobilization² and hundreds of people gathered in Atlanta for a weekend of action. Perhaps if something similar had taken place in 2022—when the movement was up and coming rather than embattled, when the state had not yet used spurious charges of terrorism and racketeering to intimidate potential participants, when supporters were not yet busy trying to respond to the genocide in Gaza—it might have drawn much larger numbers, which might in turn have made it more difficult for the government to regain the initiative.

For that to have taken place at the end of summer 2022, however, a critical mass of people outside of Atlanta would have had to realize how pivotal the movement was and immediately invest energy in organizing to support it. They would have needed to recognize—long before the police murdered anyone or charged anyone with terrorism—that the movement’s apparent success introduced new perils. Had they succeeded in bringing new forces to bear against Cop City, this would likely have contributed to tensions with established local organizers in Atlanta and with those who were already occupying the forest. They would have needed to accept those tensions as necessary growing pains.

The outcome of the struggle over Cop City has had profound implications for movements around the United States and, consequently, for people all around the world. If nothing else, we can learn the importance of recognizing the stakes of a fight while there is still time.

Infighting

Every movement that undergoes severe repression experiences internal conflict, and the movement to stop Cop City was no exception. As has been said before, the function of repression is not simply to strike the immediate targets, but to send shockwaves through a movement in a way that opens up fault lines.

The movement endured three years of intense struggle, in part, by adhering to one fundamental principle: members refrained from publicly denouncing each other. Disagreements or critiques were handled internally whenever possible. Groups that could not reconcile their differences simply avoided each other. Saboteurs, tree-sitters, rioters, and others took action against Cop City, secure in the knowledge that they would not be labeled “crazy” on prime-time news—at least, not by other activists. Canvassers, community organizers, fundraisers, and event coordinators could rest assured that, for the most part, social media would not be flooded with rage-fueled rants denouncing their strategies as hopeless or naïve.

Anonymous internet users violated this principle repeatedly. Each time, it threw the radical segments of the movement into temporary disarray. Coinciding with moments of intense repression, spiteful statements and semi-coherent allegations flooded the internet, contributing to an atmosphere of fear and tension. This underscores the need for well-delivered, constructive criticism—whether in public venues or private face-to-face exchanges.

From the earliest days of the movement, some grassroots organizers sought to smear it. Through whisper campaigns, gossip, and private conversations, they tried to prevent it from gaining momentum. They labeled it “all white,” or claimed that organizers hadn’t “consulted the community” before launching actions, echoing the “outside agitators” narrative pushed by the police chief and Mayor Dickens. On a podcast, one person shamelessly declared the movement “more disappointing than Cop City itself”—a pro-repression stance thinly disguised as progressive politics.

Until the struggle became too large to ignore, some local activists derided it. On Signal groups, they sowed doubt, division, and paranoia—particularly targeting out-of-towners and newcomers—while technically adhering to the movement’s commitment to discretion. As large non-profit organizations began to support the movement, some activists discouraged them from allocating resources to the participants who were taking significant risks.

Ironically, many of those who attempted to undermine the movement also sought to benefit from its momentum. NGO staffers and careerists continue to cash in, earning accolades and grants on behalf of a movement for which they risked very little. Meanwhile, many of those facing felony charges and living under surveillance continue to struggle below the federal poverty line.

Critique is essential. Aspiring revolutionaries should actively seek critical input, as the cost of error can be extremely high. Criticism helps refine strategies and fosters humility in the face of immense obstacles and uncertainty. Anyone serious about dismantling the carceral state, overthrowing capitalism, and transforming the world must first admit that they don’t know everything and that it will be necessary to refine their theories and strategies on an ongoing basis.

Unfortunately, petty and self-serving forms of criticism remain all too common. Real critique uplifts, educates, and transforms the participants. When people engage in denunciatory attacks and gossip, this can obscure the true cost of political errors, burying self-reflection under an avalanche of invective and rumor. This fosters defensiveness, stubbornness, ego trips, and factionalism, ultimately leading to the propagation of dogmas that remain untested. This isn’t just a problem for collectives, crews, and organizing groups—it can stunt entire movements. It’s a challenge that all humanity has a stake in overcoming.

Moving Ahead in a Cop Nation

Those who have fought to oppose the construction of Cop City in Weelaunee Forest were correct to identify the project as marking the dawn of a new era of police militarization in the United States. Local authorities plan to build at least eighty additional police training facilities across the United States; every state except for Wyoming is planning at least one.

Despite courageous efforts, they did not manage to save the forest from destruction or prevent the completion of the project. Only two options remain for closing down Cop City: pressuring policymakers to defund it after it opens or directly destroying the site. Only a mass revolt or carefully planned acts of sabotage unlike any that have occurred thus far could achieve either of those outcomes. During the movement, thousands repeatedly chanted, “If you build it, we will burn it.” It remains to be seen whether they were serious or bluffing.

The police are a central pillar of the state. Appearances aside, the government is not primarily composed of bureaucracies, libraries, clinics, or universities. At its core, it is made up of armies, borders, prisons, and police.³ Societies embroiled in destabilizing conflicts often see social services, welfare, and even parliamentary systems collapse, but the repressive functions of the state never collapse on their own—they can only be dismantled by powerful revolutionary movements.

The power of the police will not simply fade away. Those who rule depend upon it; it is essential to preserving the inequalities that are the foundation of their authority. All evidence indicates that the power of the police will continue to expand until the social order that requires it is destroyed. If that occurs, it will not simply be the consequence of a change in public opinion; it will involve real people taking real actions against real infrastructure. Because the concentration of armed force is inevitable in all unequal societies, doing away with the police will require abolishing artificial scarcity and war between classes, castes, and nations.

We did not fight to stop Cop City because we believed that all it would take to reform capitalism and the state would be a few concerts and a little vandalism. We fought because we hoped that this particular fight could clarify the stakes of the struggle that is taking place at this critical juncture in history, drawing more people into action and deepening our joint effort to change the world.

And that is something we still believe in.

Timeline: December 2023 to January 2025

December 27: A Chase Bank in NYC is vandalized with “Stop Cop City” and “Free Gaza” painted on its veneer and its doors locked. A demonstration takes place outside the home of Jonna Hamilton, the senior legal counsel of Nationwide Insurance, which provides coverage for the Atlanta Police Foundation.
December 31: Charleston Police and FBI arrest a 21-year-old in Charleston, South Carolina. Police allege the accused is responsible for burning two trucks belonging to Thomas Concrete, and for painting “You build it, we burn it” on the trucks, as well as slogans about Weelaunee Forest.
January 1: A car is burned outside of Portland City Commissioner Rene Gonzalez’s house. The action is dedicated to fallen revolutionaries, including Tortuguita, as well as two unhoused people in Portland who died as a consequence of police enforcement tactics advocated by Gonzalez.
January 2: A proposal appears online inviting people to conduct solidarity actions and events on January 18, the day of Tortuguita was killed. Manuel’s Tavern is vandalized in advance of an appearance by Mayor Dickens; its doors are glued shut, its walls painted. The scheduled visit is canceled.
January 16: A feller buncher belonging to Shadowbox Studios is burned in the forest.
January 17: The news comes out that the cost of the Cop City project has increased from $90 million to $109 million. The authorities blame security costs, damage from protests, and increased insurance costs.
January 18: On the “Day of the Forest Defender,” around the country, hundreds of people participate in events commemorating the death of Tortuguita. Nearly fifty events take place for the occasion, including vigils, teach-ins, rallies, film screenings, and fundraisers. In addition, 18 windows are broken at the San Francisco Credit Union; in Hanover, Germany, a car belonging to Autobahn GmbH is burned; windows are broken at two different Nationwide subsidiaries in Atlanta; MTU Solutions is vandalized in Novi, Michigan; UPS tires are slashed in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
January 19: Someone liberates ten chickens in the Northern UK in memory of Tortuguita.
January 25: Four machines belonging to Brent Scarborough are burned on Boulevard Drive near the Federal Penitentiary in southeast Atlanta. No communiqué appears online, but local police stage a press conference nonetheless.
January 27: A bank in Chicago is redecorated with posters in memory of Tortuguita.
January 29: Protesters lock down at a Brasfield & Gorrie job site in Midtown.
January 30: A cybersecurity incident cripples the municipal government in Atlanta.
February 1: Someone sabotages 11 ATMS belonging to Truist Bank with glue and glues the doors shut.
February 8: Atlanta Police, the ATF, and the FBI raid three homes in southeast Atlanta in a joint operation, each targeting one house. They arrest one person, charging him with first-degree arson, and detain another for several hours. Police attempt to violently humiliate the residents of the house they raid, forcing one resident outside without her clothes on to be photographed by masked thugs; at another house, officers drag a resident down the stairs by his hair.
February 10: In Lakewood, Atlanta, just blocks from two of the houses raided on the 8th, a police car catches fire in front of the home of an APD officer. The accompanying statement reads, in part: “We wish to dispel any notion that people will take this latest wave of repression lying down, or that arresting alleged arsonists will deter future arsons.” In St Paul, Minnesota, two trucks and trailers loaded with timber are burned at a Home Depot in solidarity with Jack and those affected by the raids. “It is time to destroy those who destroy the earth,” the statement reads.
February 11: Police raid another home in Lakewood, in broad daylight, following the burning of the police cruiser the day before. Nobody is arrested or detained, and nobody is home. FBI, GBI, ATF, the bomb squad, helicopters, armored vehicles, and undercover police vehicles establish a presence in the area for days. In San Francisco, Waymo self-driving cars are vandalized “with hammers and knives” in solidarity with those in Atlanta facing police harassment.
February 12: The owner of the home raided on February 11 holds a press conference denouncing the police action at his home. Elsewhere, the Davinci Development website is vandalized by hackers.
February 23: The Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City in Tucson, Arizona brings together a few hundred activists from the Southwest. Three Nationwide subisidiaries lose their windows in Tucson, Arizona.
February 24: A Nationwide subsidiary in Santa Cruz has its locks filled with glue and its walls covered in spray paint.
February 25: During the Nationwide Summit, 80 people gather in a black bloc in Tucson. They march several blocks and smash all of the windows of Wells Fargo and PNC Bank in Presidio Plaza. Some decorate the walls with Tortuguita’s name.
February 26: Dozens protest at the Nationwide Headquarters in Scottsdale, AZ. Hundreds of police are deployed. At the same time, six activists lock themselves down to concrete barrels in entrance to a gated community in Fountain Hills, Arizona, where a regional executive of Nationwide lives. In New York City, over 200 protesters march into the offices of Nationwide and AXA XL—insurers of the Atlanta Police Foundation and Brasfield & Gorrie, respectively. This is the largest protest connected to the movement to take place outside of Georgia.
February 27: A video release shows multiple Nationwide locations vandalized in New York City.
February 28: Ten New York Police Department vehicles are splashed with paint and have their tires slashed.
March 5: About twenty Black women protest outside the home of Mayor Dickens in the early hours, demanding the city government drop the court appeal blocking the referendum to stop Cop City. In the United Kingdom, a dairy farm in Leistershire is extensively vandalized in solidarity with Jack and others facing repression in Atlanta.
March 7: One person locks down to construction equipment at a Brasfield & Gorrie site in Midtown as a crowd gathers below. After several hours, he is removed and charged with misdemeanor trespassing.
March 11: Protesters disrupt a Mayoral panel featuring Andre Dickens in Austin, Texas. The event is canceled and Dickens is chased off-site. In Oregon, a butcher shop in Portland is vandalized in solidarity with Jack.
March 14: Eight machines belonging to Brent Scarborough are burned in Henry County, GA.
March 27: Two activists climb up a 250-foot crane at a Brasfield & Gorrie job site in Midtown Atlanta to disrupt work. This time, the activists are charged with felonies. Elsewhere, an I-5 highway sign is redecorated.
March 28: Anarchists in the northern United Kingdom liberate 41 ducks from a farm in memory of Tortuguita and in solidarity with Jack. Also, at some point in March, someone tampered with the tables of the Atlanta Police Department, temporarily freeing the horses.
April 16: Several pieces of machinery belonging to Brasfield & Gorrie are burned in Fayetteville, Georgia. No communiqué accompanies the action, but police publicly speculate that it is related to Cop City.
April 22: People wheat-paste posters and paint slogans all over Emory University campus denouncing the institution for ties to Israel and the Atlanta Police Foundation. Six surveillance cameras are disabled by various methods.
April 25: Students and others set up an encampment in solidarity with Gaza at Emory University in the context of a national mobilization against US support for the Israeli genocide in Palestine. Protesters connect Israel to Cop City. Emory Police and Georgia State Patrol attack the crowd, firing pepper balls at protesters, tasing medics, and slamming professors to the ground. As the day passes, crowds descend from classes onto the quad to confront police and block prisoner transport vehicles. Police shoot rubber bullets at students. In the early evening, faculty and students occupy Candler School of Theology atrium. As police arrive, protesters use reinforced banners to clash with police and to protect each other from rubber bullets and pepper balls.
April 26: More than 500 people reconverge on the Emory quad after a day of clashes with police on campus. Protesters flood Cox Hall, temporarily occupying the building. During an emergency faculty meeting on campus, staff move to hold a “no-confidence” vote on President Fenves. Fenves sends an email to thousands of students, alleging that “outsiders” were converging on campus in buses. Despite his allegations, corporate news platforms report that over 90% of the previous day’s arrestees were students or faculty. In New York City, during an Atlanta Police recruitment event, someone pulls the fire alarm of the Marriott hotel and 300 crickets are released inside the building. Graffiti decorates the courtyard.
April 27: To further disrupt the Atlanta Police recruitment event, cement is poured into the plumbing system of the hotel.
April 28: Faculty and staff walk out on Emory campus, denouncing President Greg Fenves for calling the police on student protesters.
April 29: Three OMNY machines and three MTA machines on the New York subway are smashed in memory of Tortuguita. At Cal Poly Humboldt, a Gaza solidarity protester builds a tree-sit beside occupied Siemens Hall in memory of Tortuguita.
April 30: During the eviction of Hamilton Hall and the West Lawn at Columbia University, the crowd begins chanting “Stop Cop City.”
May 1: Hundreds march on Emory Campus with reinforced banners, temporarily seizing control of the Oxford/Undergraduate Admissions building. Police drag George State University students wearing keffiyehs at the graduation ceremony off stage.
May 3: Some 75% of Emory faculty vote “no confidence” in President Fenves. Protesters march to the headquarters of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange program on Georgia State University campus, long the target of the stop Cop City movement and now of the Gaza solidarity protests as well. Protesters clash with police while trying to enter the building, using shields, reinforced banners, and umbrellas to protect each other. The crowd disperses with no arrests.
May 4: About 60 protesters gather near the GILEE headquarters again; several dozen riot police stage nearby. The crowd decides not to march and assembles in deliberation instead.
May 6: Morehouse students issue a public letter to the Board of Trustees, reiterating their call to sever ties with Cop City and the Atlanta Committee for Progress and to cut ties with Israel.
May 7: The Atlanta Journal Constitution attempts to split Stop Cop City and Gaza solidarity protests by urging anti-war activists not to be “co-opted” by activists fighting police militarization in “southeast Atlanta,” just a few miles from Emory campus. Spelman students issue an open letter to the Board of Trustees urging them to cut ties with Israel and Cop City.
May 10: Columbia University Hamilton Hall arrestees issue a statement directly connecting the genocide in Gaza to the GILEE program and the construction of Cop City and similar projects around the United States.
May 11: Thirteen Emory arrestees issue a public statement demanding that Emory cut ties with Israel and Cop City and drop all charges against protesters on campus.
May 20: The Atlanta Police Foundation pays twelve temp workers hired by “Our America” to attend a City Council session in order to read statements in support of Cop City.
May 21: An NYPD bus is burned in Brooklyn in memory of Tortuguita and in retaliation for police brutality at a Palestine solidarity protest in Bay Ridge, NYC.
May 29: The Guardian publishes an article exposing constant surveillance and harassment of southeast Atlanta residents. The harassment includes hundreds of visits by police at homes day and night; during these visits, officers sometimes park outside of the houses for a few minutes without approaching. Other times, they shine lights into windows and blare their sirens outside the homes of activists with suspected ties to the Defend the Forest/Stop Cop City movement. In one instance, a lit road flare is placed in the bushes directly outside a window.
May 31: Multiple water mains explode across Atlanta, leaving a majority of residents without clean running water for a week. Many people connect the collapse of city infrastructure to the channeling of tremendous amounts of funding to police.
June 3: Groups involved in the movement join Palestine solidarity activists in calling for disruptions at the first US Presidential debate on June 27.
June 5: A 20-year-old anarchist named Cyprus is subpoenaed in Charleston, South Carolina and summoned to a Federal Grand Jury investigating alleged acts of arson against Cop City subcontractors.
June 20: In NYC, people disrupt a budget session at City Hall. NYC Mayor Eric Adams wants to cut the public library budget in order to build a Cop City-inspired facility in Queens. Local New Yorkers begin organizing against the project.
June 25: A lawyer representing the Atlanta Solidarity Fund files a motion to dismiss the case against them after it is learned that the Attorney General’s office failed to hire a “filter team” to redact client-attorney emails subpoenaed by the State. Those emails were read by law enforcement and included in evidence.
June 27: Using reinforced pipes, activists lock down in the driveway of Hudson Technologies in Smyrna, Georgia. Hudson produces arms for the Israeli army. Activists denounce the war on Gaza and demand a right to vote via referendum on Cop City. That night, two demonstrations take place in the vicinity of the Presidential debate. Several hundred police officers swarm the area, both in uniforms and undercover. Around one hundred protesters gather for a black bloc but decide not to initiate a combative demonstration. They march a few blocks before dispersing without arrests.
July 4: Cyprus publicly declares their intention to resist the Federal Grand Jury targeting the Stop Cop City movement. They call for others to resist the hearings without compromise. Six Flock cameras are destroyed in Savannah, Georgia.
July 10: In Okemos, Michigan, protesters visit the home of Paul Kearney, Chief Claims Officer for Accident Fund Insurance.
July 31: A grand jury subpoena targeting Cyprus is withdrawn, likely as a consequence of their commitment to resist the hearing.
August 13: A machine belonging to the Brent Scarborough Company is burned on Memorial Drive. Unknown saboteurs use “improvised incendiary devices” to destroy the machines of the Cop City contractor.
August 22: A industrial railroad bridge burns near Milwaukie, Oregon. The saboteurs connect the shipping company to the Israeli war in Palestine and to Cop City.
January 18, 2025: Day of the Forest Defender events coinciding with “Festivals of Resistance” against the incoming Trump-Vance-Musk administration take place in over twenty locations. Five hundred people gather in Richmond. In Olympia, a thousand people march. The mother of Tortuguita joins local musicians at an event in Atlanta. Somewhere in Northern California, anonymous saboteurs disable a dozen trucks belonging to Green Diamond Resource Company in memory of Tortuguita.

Re-litigating the past can be tempting for those who have experienced traumatic failures and setbacks, as it allows us to take responsibility for the past by criticizing ourselves and others. It is important to approach such questions with humility and to resist the temptation to shift the goalposts in response to setbacks. From the outset, participants in the movement boldly maintained that they intended to win. Some of them criticized discourses that trivialized the concept of victory or made apologies for failure. “The real stopping Cop City is the friends we made along the way”—it might be easy to say something like this today, but it would not represent the spirit of the movement. ↩
Speaking tours promoting the movement to defend the forest did take place in 2022, but on a smaller scale than the speaking tours in the lead-up to the Block Cop City mobilization. ↩
In contexts where the power of the police is subcontracted out to third parties or paramilitaries, we could say that the state itself has already transformed into a corporate or factional enterprise. ↩

Then They Came for the Palestinians : How to Respond to the Kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil

2025-03-11T10:20:24Z

On March 8, Department of Homeland Security agents kidnapped Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian organizer and graduate student at Columbia University who had permanent residency in the United States. Donald Trump’s State Department arbitrarily revoked his residency. They are holding Khalil in Louisiana, over a thousand miles from his home.

This is part of Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on Palestine solidarity activism at Columbia University and other schools around the country. Above all, however, it is a test, and how we respond will determine what happens to the rest of us later—as Martin Niemöller described in his well-known poem.

Here, we will explore the stakes of this moment and share experience from anarchists whose comrade was similarly kidnapped for participating in the Occupy ICE movement in San Antonio, Texas in 2018.

The Antisemitic Plan to Smear Palestine Solidarity as Antisemitic

The Trump regime has promised to deport millions of undocumented people, and their efforts are already underway. The kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil is something different. Khalil is a permanent resident of the United States who is being targeted for political reasons. Trump is seeking to set an additional precedent in order to open a new front in his campaign to purge the United States of dissidents.

This is the culmination of two years of planning. In April 2023, the billionaire-backed Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a playbook to overhaul the federal government of the United States in order to consolidate autocratic power in the hands of Donald Trump. Although Trump temporarily distanced himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, it proved to be a solid predictor of his game plan once in office.

In October 2024, the Heritage Foundation followed up Project 2025 with Project Esther, a playbook for repressing those who oppose the genocide of Palestinians. In the text of their report, the Heritage Foundation depicts all concern for Palestinians as participation in “a global Hamas Support Network” and explicitly accuses Jewish Voice for Peace and many other Jewish people of being “antisemitic” for refusing to support Zionism. At the same time, the report relies heavily on anti-Semitic tropes such as fearmongering about George Soros. This exemplifies the way that the far right has sought to appropriate concerns about antisemitism to promote racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

A slide from a Heritage Foundation presentation about Project Esther. Note that “Soros” and Jewish Voice for Peace are at the tops of the columns titled “Masterminds” and “Organizers.”

The chief source of Trump’s appeal is that he has been able to channel the considerable anger of the downwardly mobile away from those who hold power and towards scapegoats, creating a pressure valve for a wide range of resentments. But in order to scapegoat people without consequences, it is necessary to undermine their social ties, to prevent others from identifying with them, to carve up society into isolated and mutually hostile factions.

Reducing all empathy for Palestinians to support for Hamas is a discursive maneuver intended to frame all who speak out against genocide as legitimate targets for Trump’s government. In addition to demonizing Palestinians, Project Esther lays the groundwork to attack Jewish people as “antisemites” if they don’t get on board with Christian Nationalist priorities. This strategy weaponizes an existing rift that cuts through the Democratic Party—the question of whether Palestinians deserve to be treated as human beings—in order to create the conditions for a fascist takeover of the United States as well as further colonial violence abroad. The ones who stand to gain the most from this strategy are not Zionist Jews, but authoritarian Gentiles.

In view of the significance of Project 2025, we should not underestimate how central Project Esther is to the Trump administration’s strategy. This will help us to understand the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil.

The core of Trump policy is performative violence. That is why they have kidnapped an activist who has never been charged with a crime, whose wife—an American citizen—is eight months pregnant, who has a legal right to reside in the United States according to all established precedents. That is why they intentionally targeted a negotiator, the same way that the Israeli government routinely murders negotiators in Palestine. The point is to be shocking, to terrorize, to show that they can do things in public that the Biden administration had to do secretively.

Everyone who has excused or minimized the genocide of Palestinians—for example, by spending at least as much time talking about the 1139 Israelis killed on October 7, 2023 as they do addressing the tens of thousands of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian people slaughtered since then—must understand that today, supporting Israel means supporting Trump’s brand of fascism. The escalating violence of the Israeli colonial project helped create the conditions for Trump’s return; now that he is back in office, excusing Israeli colonialism can only facilitate Trump’s own consolidation of power. As we argued on the night of the 2024 election,

The Biden administration has already done much of the work to desensitize the general public to the program that an emboldened second Trump administration will attempt to carry out—above all, by supporting the Israeli military in carrying out a brutal genocide in Gaza. In so doing, Biden and Harris have accustomed millions of people to the idea that human life has no inherent value—that it is acceptable to slaughter, imprison, and torment people based on their status in a targeted demographic.

You either embrace the struggle for the liberation of Palestine or you become an accomplice in the rise of fascism. This was always true, but today there is no possible excuse not to recognize it.

Even if your sole concern is fighting antisemitism and you do not care what happens to people of any other ethnicity, you pave the way for antisemites to gain power by standing aside as Palestinians are kidnapped. Like Palestinians, Jewish people are on the hit list of potential scapegoats, and what befalls one scapegoat will eventually befall another.

If there are no serious consequences for the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil, then soon enough, the Trump administration will push the envelope, moving on to kidnap other activists who obstruct the far-right agenda. Likewise, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is a template for bloodshed that will be used again and again as long as there are no significant consequences. If politicians like Trump retain their sway by inflicting violence, they will have to continuously expand the range of people they target and the intensity of that violence, just as the Nazis did between 1933 and 1945.

What Will It Take?

For now, a judge has ordered a temporary delay in the expulsion of Mahmoud Khalil from the United States. But this should reassure no one. If we count on judges to restrain Trump, we will have no recourse when Trump’s administration simply ignores the laws, and no plan when he manages to replace them with loyal flunkies—or has his flunkies replace the laws themselves.

On March 10, demonstrators gathered in New York City for a protest that took the streets, resulting at one point in tussles with police. On March 11 and 12, further protests will ensue in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and elsewhere.

But the point of these protests must not be to petition the authorities. Donald Trump is not a well-meaning public servant looking to represent his constituents. He is a power-hungry sadist who benefits from our displays of grief and impotent rage. Politics in the United States today is a question of relations of raw force. When we take the streets, we are not addressing Trump or his ghoulish underlings; we are addressing each other. We are setting out to demonstrate that resistance is possible, that there are tactics that can exert concrete leverage against our oppressors, that there are enough people invested in solidarity that it can become a social force capable of compelling Trump and his lackeys to stand down.

At the March 10 demonstration in New York, participants handed out fliers to this effect:

Fascist politicians need the police. But we know masses of people can get the better of the police, their cars, equipment, cameras. All we have to do is to start acting like our friends, neighbors, and our own lives are at stake. All other options have been exhausted. We have to pull down the new fascism before it consolidates control. If we settle for waving signs and chanting, our fate is sealed. If we remember the summer of 2020, we stand a fighting chance.

Mahmoud Khalil.

Learning from Experience

Mahmoud Khalil is not the first person in recent history to be targeted by ICE for political activism. To get more perspective, we reached out to anarchists in San Antonio whose comrade was kidnapped during the Occupy ICE movement in 2018.

This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. In 2018, ICE targeted a filmmaker and student for their participation in the Occupy ICE camp in San Antonio. They were targeted as a consequence of their activism; the authorities used their political beliefs and tweets as evidence against them.

Both our movement and the campaign to free our friend were held back by our decision to defer to the lawyers. The lawyers wanted to run a PR campaign based on respectability politics and innocence narratives, erasing our radical politics from the conversation. As time went on, the lawyers related with hostility and suspicion towards some participants in the movement.

Deferring to the lawyers and separating the legal support from the movement itself was detrimental to both. We gave up many tools that we could have used to fight; this contributed to fragmenting our movement. There was no rally, no day of action, no unrest, no political scandal. Not even a phone zap!

In 2018, we were aware of the example of the Northwest Detention Center resistance, at which ICE detained the activist Maru Villaplanado. Maru Villaplanado was ultimately released and granted legal status due to a campaign of pressure and mobilization. Unfortunately, this knowledge did not lead us to take the kind of action that could have made a difference for our friend.

Many of us were young and inexperienced. We did not know better than to trust the lawyers. We didn’t know how to draw on the experience of other movements before us or around the country. Since then, we have learned that lawyers should have a very limited influence on our movements. They should focus on their work in the courts. We must prioritize organizing a strong political response, as that is the only real source of power and pressure that we can draw upon outside the legal system.

There is no silver bullet or magic combination of tactics that would be guaranteed to stop Mahmoud’s deportation. However, if we limit ourselves to depending upon a legal system that has no regard for the humanity of its captives while the state targets an activist on explicitly political grounds, we will fail while simultaneously sabotaging ourselves. We wonder how differently things might have gone if we had called for national days of action. We wonder if there was some chance that we could have stopped them from deporting our friend. We don’t know the answer because we didn’t try.

To have any chance of saving Mahmoud Khalil or any of the millions of immigrants in the crosshairs of the white supremacist state, we will need movements that are resilient, that grow in numbers and combativeness. Palestinian, immigrant, Black, Indigenous, and working-class organization and action must create a political crisis that interrupts the deportation machine. If we lead with an organized political response, we will have a better chance of stopping the deportation of Mahmoud and our other comrades and of interrupting the entire system it relies on. I hope that everyone who is confronting this tragedy today can learn something from our experience and put those lessons into practice.

This is not the first time this has happened. If our enemies have their way, it won’t be the last. It is up to us to organize in defense of our friends, families, and neighbors.

-Some Cicadas from Abolish ICE, San Antonio, Texas

We Are Made for Each Other

Let us conclude by expressing gratitude for the courage of Mahmoud Khalil and others who have risked their own freedom in order to express solidarity with other people. In doing so, they show us what is best in humanity—and that gives us a reason to fight for ourselves and each other. Khalil has already distinguished himself in the fight to create a world without ethnic cleansing or genocide. It remains for us to do the same in return.

For everyone who has met Mahmoud, they can attest to his incredible character, humbleness, selflessness, and his love for helping others. He is always willing to stand up for the oppressed. He is funny, kind, and sometimes a little messy. He constantly puts his needs last when it comes to helping others. I always tell him that sometimes he needs to put himself first. He always responds with, “People are made for each other, and you should always be willing to lend a helping hand.”

-Mahmoud Khalil’s wife (identified thus, rather than by name, in the original source)

There is a fundraiser for Mahmoud Khalil here.

The Palestine solidarity movement on Columbia campus in spring 2024.

"The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon Musk" : A Bus Driver's Perspective on Elon Musk's Austerity Measures

2025-02-24T13:23:25Z

In the following narrative, a bus driver describes how the cuts that Elon Musk is carrying out in the federal government are affecting ordinary public transit workers.

There is a poetic opposition between the figure of the anonymous bus driver and Elon Musk, the billionaire car mogul. The bus driver and the automobile profiteer represent different modes of transportation—public and private—that imply different models for society. On the one hand, a vision of collectivity emerging from common resources and public service; on the other, an unbridled profit motive justifying privatization, isolation, and immiseration. Everyone riding together—or the lone plutocrat speeding away from a betrayed community. Why else market the “Cybertruck” as bulletproof?

Elon Musk made much of his fortune from taxpayer-funded subsidies; now he is trying to delete all of the functions of the government except the ones that benefit him personally. The irony of a man who made his fortune selling cars implying that impoverished bus drivers are parasites on the public should not be lost on anyone. As much as Elon Musk pretends to be an enemy of big government, billionaires like him need the state more than anyone else does. It is easy enough to imagine public transit without the state—all it would take would be to abolish the mechanisms (such as property rights) that impose artificial scarcity, so that those who enjoy doing things for others’ benefit could do so without fear of going hungry. But it is not possible to imagine Elon Musk without a government forcefully extracting hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes with which to protect him from those he exploits and oppresses.

People around the country have begun expressing their displeasure against Elon Musk by demonstrating at Tesla dealerships. Another round of demonstrations is scheduled for March 1, this Saturday. Without further ado, the bus driver’s story.

Click on the image to download the flier.

“The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon Musk”

“Did you see that Facebook post about the budget cuts?” my co-worker asks. “What the fuck, no,” I reply. She hands me her phone. I see a headline announcing that, due to the push to slash basic services coming from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, 20% of our funding for local public transportation is now threatened. Lawyers are fighting it out in the courts, but if these cuts go through, it will mean less service, possible layoffs, and lots of people not having access to a system that is one of the few lifelines for poor people in our area. People depend on these buses to get to their jobs, to medical appointments, to programs for special needs adults, to court dates.

I sit back down, staring out the window at the cold, grey parking lot. I am waiting for a member of the morning shift to come in with a bus so I can take it out. A few buses dot the bus yard. They’re sitting idle because the parts on order haven’t come in for months—even years, in some cases—and because the city refuses to hire enough mechanics to keep up with daily maintenance. This means that drivers on night shift, like me, sometimes have to wait hours for a bus to arrive. Our transit agency, which contracts out to a huge multi-national corporation, is already dramatically underfunded. The new cuts will only compound our existing problems.

“Fucking Musk, man,” I say with a sigh. Another co-worker on the night shift agrees with me. He’s in his mid-70s, but he’s still working full time because he recently burned through all his savings burying his parents. I launch into a long rant about how both Musk and Trump hate labor unions and workers and want to replace us all with artificial intelligence. A third co-worker, presumably a Trump supporter, grumbles about how “they” just want to blame the cuts threatening our jobs on the “administration.”

Who else would you blame it on?

It’s pitch-dark when I enter the trailer park, passing a metal gate, I drive slowly through the ever-growing rows of manufactured homes. Some of them have signs reading “For sale.”

“Lots of people moving out?” I ask my only passenger.

“Yeah, no one can afford to live here anymore,” she replies. As I turn the corner, she launches into a long tirade about the corporation who owns the trailer park and how they keep raising the cost of “space rent,” the monthly fee that mobile home owners pay to trailer park owners. “Every year the rent here goes up. New people move in from out of town and they can pay more, and that’s pushing us out,” she says, as I unhook her walker inside the cold, dark bus cab. “I don’t know why the landlords are so greedy. Do they just want everything?” I lower her and her walker down onto the pavement outside her trailer.

As the electronic ramp whirls its gears, I turn to my left. In her front window, there is a strange collage of images of Donald Trump. It is faded and worn from the sun. I shake my head and chuckle, resisting the temptation to point out the obvious. How can you complain about a corporate landlord ruining your life, but place all of your hopes in another landlord who is trying to become a dictator?

Perhaps she senses my disdain. “Trump is gonna fix it, you’ll see. Prices are going to go down once he starts drilling.”

My eyes narrow. “Biden was drilling more oil than any president before him,” I reply.

“He needs to get his head drilled,” she retorts, making me laugh. Then she launches into another rant about DEI and how it ruined the schools she apparently taught at before she retired. As she hobbles inside, I cast one more glance over my shoulder. Trump’s smiling face leers back at me, ominous. The machine moans as the wheelchair lift cycles back into place.

I meet all sorts of people like this at my job. One guy smells like piss so bad while I strap in his wheelchair that I have to turn my head so I don’t gag. The car in front of the house where I pick him up has a bumper sticker on it reading, “I Don’t Trust the Liberal Media.” I wonder if the conservative media is telling him his healthcare is about to be nuked from orbit.

Another guy, as I load and unload his wheelchair, takes out his Trump hat, puts it on, and asks me what I think of it. I tell him Trump and Musk want to use the military to shoot protesters, destroy unions, and fire workers like me, so why would I give a fuck about them. He looks away, says, “Alright then,” and jets off on his electronic scooter. I wonder if he is looking forward to ICE deporting half of his neighbors.

On election day, I lost it and got into a heated back and forth with a pro-Trump guy. He rested his case by proclaiming that we need to make it easier on rich people so that the wealth will trickle down to the rest of us. I want to grab these people and shake them.

Trump represents the triumph of the nihilism of our age. The foreclosure of the idea that the working-class can take and shape its own destiny. Instead, apparently, we should throw ourselves at the mercy of a reality TV star who shits in a gold toilet, eats breakfast with billionaire pedophiles, and has dinner with neo-Nazis between rounds of golf. In the absence of the kind of social movements that could connect people and enable them to grow and change, Trump has built a mass parasocial spectacle that makes these isolated people feel like they are part of something greater than themselves even as all of our lives become smaller and smaller, more and more impoverished and alienated.

There’s an old saying that society get the villains it deserves. Perhaps our age is getting the fascists it deserves, too.

I shuffle into the union hall, past the placards reading “ON STRIKE” and faded signs several decades old. Almost fifteen years ago, during Occupy, I attended a meeting in this same room. I wonder what’s changed since then. I find a seat and one of our union shop stewards slides a packet across the table to me. I open it up and start paging through it, looking at the spreadsheets and graphs.

We start to discuss the ins and outs of the proposed contract that our elected union representatives and corporate lawyers have been going over during recent meetings. One of the much-hated top corporate bosses was recently fired for corruption, much to the delight of the entire workforce. As one of my co-workers said, “Really tells you a lot about a place when motherfuckers are walking around singing, ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead!’ and morale has never been higher!”

We go through the contract. Despite a few small improvements, things are mostly the same. “What about the pay?” I ask, fingers crossed. The shop steward cocks her head to the side and turns a page, pointing with her pen to a graph showing a dollar increase. She explains that the contract will be for five years, during which time we’ll only be getting a few cents more each year. “This is literally what I was making ten years ago,” I sigh, “and this contract will be valid for five years?”

I already can’t save money. Imagine what things will be like in five years.

She shrugs. “We’re encouraging you to vote “Yes,”’ she says, and hands me a piece of paper on which to mark an “X” signifying yes or no.

If enough workers vote the contract through, the company will ratify it and it will govern my life for the next five years—presuming that I don’t get downsized. Any strike or protest activity will be illegal, as per our “No Strike” agreement. If enough people vote no, it goes back to the union bargaining team, and they will continue to bargain for more changes in closed door meetings.

I head into another room, mark an X by “NO,” and drop the piece of paper into a wooden box. I wave to a few co-workers on my way out. As I leave, I pass a portrait of Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union. You smug bastard, I say to myself. I remember his glasses and bald head on stage of the Republican National Convention last year, when he called Donald Trump a “Tough son of a bitch.” What a dipshit.

I used to have a poster in my room many years ago, proclaiming, “The past doesn’t pass.” Next to the slogan was a photo of striking Teamster bus drivers—bus drivers, just like me—beating police officers with baseball bats during the general strike of 1934 in Minneapolis. That was one of the decisive labor battles that forced the ruling class to accept the New Deal in order to cool down the class war that was brewing on the streets.

The past doesn’t pass, but the future can leave you behind.

At home, I look over a letter announcing that people in my neighborhood shouldn’t drink the tap water because the levels of uranium in the river are too high. Sometimes I wonder what I would say to my children about this moment in history—if I could afford to have children. Probably the same things my parents say to me now: they’re sorry we are inheriting this world. Sorry they didn’t fix it. Sorry they didn’t build strong enough movements to turn the tide against these monsters.

At work, as I drive, I begin to notice that there are fewer Trump flags and signs out. Resentment is rising. A joke by a cashier here about being replaced by AI, a comment there about Trump cutting programs. I walk into the break room and someone is shaking their head angrily while watching a video of Musk on their phone. They mutter something about tariffs and rising prices.

The tension in the air is palpable. It is similar to how things felt at the start of the economic crisis in 2008, when many of the homes in my neighborhood were foreclosed on and many people lost their jobs. It also reminds me of the start of the pandemic—how at first, I thought it wouldn’t be so bad, only to watch in horror as our family members and friends succumbed to the virus.

In 2008, many people thought that crowds would flood the streets immediately when the administration bailed out the banks while leaving the rest of us high and dry. That didn’t happen. It took years for resistance to grow. In Chicago, workers occupied their factory when they were terminated without pay. In Wisconsin, workers occupied the capitol building against government attacks on collective bargaining. In California, students occupied universities to protest budget cuts. The Occupy movement began in the fall of 2011 and rapidly built to massive occupations of city squares across the US, coordinated port shut downs, and a general strike in Oakland, California. With Joe Biden as vice president, the federal government helped to coordinate violent raids targeting the movement in order to break it apart.

In 2020, on the other hand, things didn’t fester—they exploded like a bomb. Millions of people across the country mobilized in response to the pandemic, providing mutual aid in the face of government inaction and right-wing disinformation, and then hit the streets in the George Floyd uprising.

Who knows how things will evolve this time. It will probably be different from both of those scenarios, but it could be similar in some ways. What is clear is that things are not as people expected them to be. Many people on the left thought—or at least hoped—that Trump would govern the way he did the first time, constrained by mass protest, the courts, and his own party. Many who voted for him honestly did not expect him to follow through on many of the policies he explicitly promised to carry out. Those who were not paying attention are surprised that suddenly, jobs are disappearing and services are being cut while prices only continue to rise.

The material conditions are forcing people to reckon with the fact that the state is attempting to reshape our lives for the sake of an authoritarian project. As we speak, thousands of people are flooding town halls across the United States, screaming at their so-called representatives about the plan to gut programs like Medicaid—only to hear the bureaucrats repeat a slew of MAGA talking points. Anger is brewing. Hopefully the MAGA strategy of “flooding the zone” with shit will produce diminishing returns as people turn towards their neighbors and co-workers and away from their phones and YouTube.

This is an opportunity for us to call out the authoritarian project of the Trump administration, the techno-dystopian fantasies of billionaires like Musk, and the complicity of the Democrats who helped make all of this possible. Beyond naming the systems that we are up against, we also need to be clear about our position as workers and how the billionaires running the country want both to hurt us and to weaponize our anger, turning us against each other through propaganda and fearmongering. This is why it’s important to stand in solidarity with everyone attacked by the Trump administration, whether trans folks, migrants, prisoners, or beyond. We can’t leave anyone behind. The only immigrant trying to steal my job is Elon Musk. It’s time to be clear that our interests are not theirs; we must develop and promote our own vision of a better world in total opposition to the ruling class, the billionaires, and their fascist puppets.

Moreover, it’s time for action. We need to give expression to these antagonisms while revealing the poverty of the institutional forms currently at our disposal—the Democratic party, the ever-shrinking union bureaucracy, the non-profits. We can show examples of past struggles and resistance from the mass wildcat strikes by teachers in West Virginia and the fierce anti-fascist mobilizations against the alt-right to the airport shutdowns following the Muslim Ban. We can support and expand the existing fronts that are already breaking out around us: protests against Musk outside of Tesla, rallies to demand that hospitals continue to treat trans people, community defense and rapid response networks to address ICE attacks, bashing back against the violence of the far right. We can demonstrate the utility of tactics and strategies that others can take up and expand on as all of us figure out how to fight in the new reality.

It’s hard to look at the news without imagining tanks on the streets or scenes out of V for Vendetta. But the scenario I worry about most is that this will simply become the new normal. That we will accept this just as we accepted the last round of attacks. As we accepted the genocide in Gaza. As we accepted the ecological gun to our heads that is climate change.

While people are angry and energized, we have a chance to push in a new direction. Let’s use this moment to foster broad and popular networks of resistance that improve our lives, strengthen our communities, and enable us to meet our needs directly. At this point, we don’t have much of a choice.

Like it or not, this is life now—and it is coming for all of us.

Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace

2025-02-21T10:26:25Z

As Donald Trump and Elon Musk subordinate the United States government to their pursuit of totalitarian power, their opponents remain in a defensive posture, accusing them of lawlessness. But neither courts nor laws will halt the descent into autocracy. Massive numbers of people will have to take it upon themselves to organize concrete acts of resistance, to take direct action on a horizontal and participatory basis—in other words, to become anarchists.

Tyranny Is the Opposite of Anarchism

On February 8, the editorial board of the New York Times wrote that Elon Musk

“is on a mission to rampage through the government’s confidential payment systems with an anarchist’s glee.”

If you know any real-life anarchists, you know how absurd this is. Given access to the government’s payment systems, no anarchist would begin by cutting off resources to starving children or medical research. An anarchist would begin by cutting off funding to the police and the other instruments of state violence—precisely the institutions that Donald Trump and Elon Musk will expand at any cost.

Anyone who tells you anarchism is about abolishing the social safety net for the sake of unbridled profit is lying to you outright. There are other words for that—for example, neoliberalism.

Anarchism is something else entirely. Anarchists propose to abolish all institutional means of coercion, so that no one can dominate or oppress anyone else:

Anarchism is the idea that everyone is entitled to complete self-determination. No law, government, or decision-making process is more important than the needs and desires of actual human beings. People should be free to shape their relations to their mutual satisfaction, and to stand up for themselves as they see fit.

Anarchists oppose all forms of hierarchy—every currency that concentrates power into the hands of a few, every mechanism that puts us at a distance from our potential.

-To Change Everything

In other words, anarchists seek to bring about a situation in which no politician or billionaire, elected or not, could ever be in a position to cut off essential resources to millions of people with the flick of a pen. This is a profounder commitment to freedom, equality, and the well-being of the general public than one can find within the halls of any government.

At this moment of peril, when aspiring autocrats have taken power and are attempting to consolidate permanent control of the state, why would the New York Times muddy the waters by taking a cheap shot at some of Donald Trump’s most determined enemies? Looking more closely at the quote above, it seems that the editorial board’s chief concern is not what will happen as a consequence of Elon Musk’s actions, but whether Musk and his cronies are following the rules properly.

A Three-Sided Conflict

As Trump and Musk carry out a hostile takeover of the United States government, outlets like the New York Times are narrating a story in which there are two sides: on one side, democracy and the rule of law, and on the other side, the criminal oligarchs that threaten to undermine them.

But this is not the only way to understand the situation.

It would be more precise to say that there are three camps—those who desire to return to the forms of governance that prevailed until January 20, 2025; those who are currently in the process of overturning that system in order to impose an even more oppressive system; and those who reject both of those options in favor of a more egalitarian alternative.

In the first camp, we find people who believe that a certain amount of self-determination is acceptable, as long as it falls neatly within whatever laws happen to be on the books. They are also comfortable with a wide range of ruthless self-seeking destructive behavior, provided that it, too, complies with those same laws. When people in this camp talk about “equality,” they do not mean that all of us should have comparable leverage on the conditions that determine what we can do with our lives. They mean equal opportunity on the market and equality before the law—both of which are preposterous to speak about when some people start life with pennies while others start with billions. People in this camp are concerned about Elon Musk overhauling the federal government, but they had no objection to him amassing hundreds of billions of dollars while a hundred million Americans lived paycheck to paycheck. They are concerned about Trump’s plans for Gaza, but until a few weeks ago many of them were perfectly at ease with the United States government funding a genocide there.

In the second camp, we find those who are determined to consolidate power in their own hands, regardless of what laws happen to be on the books. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their various capitalist, nationalist, and fascist backers will preserve whatever laws assist them and overturn the rest. They have no allegiance to any particular legal system or protocol. They seek their own advantage by any means, mendaciously claiming that they are the only ones who can address the problems of our time (“I alone can fix it”). Such people have always existed, but only over the past few years have resources become so unevenly distributed that a handful of them could take over the United States government.

Finally, in the third camp, we find anarchists and other rebels who also have no allegiance to the system of governance that has prevailed until now, but for entirely different reasons. Anarchists believe that everyone deserves the maximum amount of freedom, regardless of what laws happen to be on the books—and therefore, that no one deserves to be able to dominate anyone else, whether by hoarding access to resources or wielding the instruments of state repression. People in this camp hold that regardless of what any constitution proclaims, regardless of how an electorate votes in an election, none of us owe any allegiance to institutions that exist solely for the purpose of imposing disparities in power, whether we are talking about government departments, banks, or private military contractors. In contrast to those who are comfortable with oligarchy and ethnic cleansing as long as no one breaks the rules, there is no way to bribe or blackmail anarchists into making excuses for oppression.

Whatever your politics, you are probably sympathetic to the anarchist analysis to some degree—perhaps more than you think. Try this thought experiment:

How much do you buy into the idea that the democratic process should trump your own conscience and values? Imagine yourself in a democratic republic with slaves—say, ancient Athens, or ancient Rome, or the United States of America until the end of 1865. Would you obey the law and treat people as property while endeavoring to change the laws, knowing full well that whole generations might live and die in chains in the meantime? Or would you act according to your conscience in defiance of the law, like Harriet Tubman and John Brown?

If you would follow in the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, then you, too, believe that there is something more important than the rule of law. This is a problem for anyone who wants to make conformity with the law or with the will of the majority into the final arbiter of legitimacy.

-From Democracy to Freedom

No Law Will Give You Freedom

Staking the defense against Donald Trump on the principle that “no one is above the law” has failed for eight years now. Worse, with Trump back in control of the government, it’s a self-defeating narrative. What happens when his lackeys in Congress pass new laws and the judges he appoints rule in his favor? At that point, all this rhetoric legitimizing the law as a good in itself will only strengthen Trump’s hand.

Many people spent several years of Trump’s first term waiting on former FBI director Robert Mueller to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. As we argued back then, before Mueller’s investigation ended in a complete washout, this doomed strategy reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the balance of power and the nature of law itself:

Democrats still don’t understand how power works. Crime is not the violation of the rules, but the stigma attached to those who break rules without the power to make them. (As they say, steal $25, go to jail; steal $25 million, go to Congress.) At the height of Genghis Khan’s reign, it would have been pointless to accuse the famous tyrant of breaking the laws of the Mongol Empire; as long as Trump has enough of Washington behind him, the same goes for him. Laws don’t exist in some transcendent realm. They are simply the product of power struggles among the elite—not to mention the passivity of the governed—and they are enforced according to the prevailing balance of power. To fetishize the law is to accept that might makes right. It means abdicating the responsibility to do what is ethical regardless of what the laws happen to be.

In the long run, the courts cannot constrain Donald Trump. He controls the executive branch, the part of the government that is supposed to enforce their rulings.

Nor will the courts constrain Elon Musk. Even apart from Trump’s support, he has unlimited money for court cases. If the courts attempt to punish him by imposing fines, he can afford to pay for tens of billions of dollars’ worth of illegal activity. He already routinely refuses to pay rent and other bills that no ordinary person could ever get away with shrugging off.

Nor will the police and other law-enforcement agencies constrain Trump or Musk. In theory, the police exist to enforce laws; in practice, the average cop knows very little about the law—they’re not lawyers, after all—but a great deal about obeying orders. Trump is the favorite politician of the mercenary caste, the ones who sell their capacity to inflict violence to the highest bidder (be that the state or private security contractors). Just as Trump has filled his government with disgraced public figures who depend on him, the police are his natural allies—the more so as a consequence of their compromised relationship with the general public.

Continuing to emphasize the centrality of law in objections to Trump’s agenda can only hamstring future movements, discouraging the emergence of the only kind of resistance that could offer any hope once he has completed his takeover of the federal government.

The truth is, neither the powerful nor the oppressed have ever had good cause to obey laws—the former because the same privileges that enable them to write the laws release them from the necessity of obeying them, the latter because the laws weren’t established for their benefit in the first place.

-“Take Your Pick: Law or Freedom”

Remember How We Got Here

The binary narrative about criminal oligarchs undermining democracy and the rule of law is misleading in another way. The authoritarians who are overhauling the government do not represent the opposite of the preceding order, but the inevitable consequence of it. Their power grab is the result of several decades of democratically-managed capitalism, which enabled a coterie of billionaires to accumulate so much wealth and power that they no longer believe that they need the trappings of democracy to keep the populace appeased.

It was the rules of the previous game that created this situation. Wanting to go back a single step in history, to the previous stage of the process, is foolish, because that was the stage that led us directly to this one. It is impossible to rewind the clock—and even if we could, that would only mean arriving once again at the same situation. The problem is not simply that Musk’s protégés have run rampant through the databases of the government, though that is already producing consequences that will likely be impossible to undo. The real problem is the emergence of a caste of billionaires who no longer require the services of democracy and have enough power to do away with it.

These billionaires can buy up communication platforms, buy up both politicians and voters, use the global infrastructure under their control to determine the outcome of geopolitical struggles. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the ones who are currently attracting the most attention, but behind them are Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and many more. The individual character flaws of these men are beside the point; the significant thing is that the mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism are systematically concentrating power in the hands of people who are completely disinterested in others’ agency or well-being.

This is why milquetoast centrism cannot offer a convincing alternative to the despotism of the fascists and technocrats.

Describing the Democrats’ unsuccessful strategy of chasing Republicans further and further to the right, one Democratic politician quipped that “voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don’t want a Diet Coke.” This doesn’t put things strongly enough. Considering that Trump won the election on an explicit platform of mass deportations and autocracy, Democrats imitating Republican talking points while promising to “defend democracy” is like offering Diet Coke to a cocaine addict. Today’s Republican voters are motivated in great part by the desire to see violence directed against those more vulnerable than themselves. It is autocracy itself they desire, not any particular policy.

This bloodlust is the consequence of the avarice and narcissism that neoliberal capitalism fostered in so many people and then failed to fulfill. Those who have become accustomed to powerlessness and passivity, who urgently desire revenge but do not understand who is responsible for their situation, will elevate tyrants to power for the vicarious thrill of seeing someone made to suffer, even if the consequences make life worse for practically everyone. Doubtless some of them would change sides if they saw a real opportunity to improve their lives, but that would require much more than a promise to go back to the Biden era.

If the defenders of democracy cannot offer anything more inspiring than a return to the previous state of affairs—the one that caused this catastrophe in the first place—they will lose, and they will deserve to lose. It will take a more ambitious and far-reaching vision to defeat oligarchy.

Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace

In 2020, the most powerful uprising in living memory took place in the United States. Millions of people filled the streets. They were not galvanized by a timid electoral campaign, nor simply by the footage of police murdering George Floyd, but by the brave actions of ordinary people who stood up to injustice—above all, by the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis. By driving the political discourse in the election year, this uprising not only turned voters away from Donald Trump—it also showed billionaires that Trump would not be able to preserve conditions suitable for business, forcing them to temper their ambitions.

One poll showed Americans supporting the burning of the police precinct by a larger margin than any victorious presidential candidate this century.

In response to the uprising, Joe Biden and other Democrats doubled down on supporting the police. This shows that the Democrats believe that it is impossible to maintain power under capitalism without channeling more and more resources towards repression, tasking the police with keeping an increasingly desperate population under control.

Today, the Republicans are going even further, cultivating support for explicitly patriarchal, racist, xenophobic, and authoritarian politics—in short, for fascism. The implication is that as billionaires accumulate more and more power and the consequences of their rapaciousness trickle down to the rest of us, it will take more than police to keep the population under control: it will also take informal militias, and falsehoods about why some demographics deserve to have more power than everyone else, and probably, in the long run, ethnic cleansing and genocide on a larger scale than we have yet seen.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. invited us to trust that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But today it is clear that things are not slowly, steadily getting better, neither in the field of civil rights, nor in regards to the natural environment, nor justice, nor governance.

“The function of government is to centralize power and impose domination: to enforce, to punish, to administer. Politicians preside over an economy more oppressive and invasive than any dictatorship could be by itself.”

The state is not the solution to these problems. It is a protection racket that—until recently—purported to solve our problems in order to lull us into dependence (“I alone can fix it”!) while suppressing our ability to meet our needs without it. Now, under Trump and Musk in the United States and rulers like Javier Milei elsewhere, there is no longer any pretense that the state exists to do anything besides oppress people and defend the profits of the rich. All this time, the state has been accumulating the means—both technological and social—that are required to force this new reality on us, and now the tyrants are intent on using them.

Yet in doing so, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are giving millions of people cause to reevaluate their priorities and dedicate their lives to profound social change. The 2020 uprising offered a glimpse of what it looks like for large numbers of people to act on their own initiative, creating a groundswell of resistance that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Our chief error, in 2020, was in imagining that we could simply return to business as usual afterwards, when in fact our only hope is to change the world.

As Trump and Musk gut every aspect of the state that is not about profiteering and repression, the stakes of this moment are coming into focus. There is no more middle ground. If you care about public health, you have to become a revolutionary. If you care about medical research, you have to become a revolutionary. If you care about climate change, about labor conditions, about the well-being of children in warzones, there is nothing else for it—you have to become a revolutionary.

In the movements to come, we must make space for the civil servants Elon Musk has fired, for the scientists and academics whose funding has dried up, for those who once sought social change through electoral politics. They should put all their skills to work in new contexts, experimenting with new forms of resistance and spreading whatever strategies work far and wide. But we should not simply try to rebuild the broken system that brought us to this dire situation. We must build a new vision together along with the means to bring it into being.

Anarchists propose to build our collective capacity to act on a horizontal and decentralized basis, rather than entrusting our agency to leaders. We seek to create a lattice of overlapping participatory and voluntary associations that can meet people’s material and spiritual needs. Rather than hoarding resources for ourselves the way the billionaires do, we seek to abolish all of the mechanisms that impose artificial scarcity, to create commons that benefit everyone. We seek to generate abundance, not profit.

To be an anarchist means to recognize that our freedom and well-being are inextricably bound up with the freedom and well-being of billions like us. It means discarding all the old excuses for remaining subservient to those who only endeavor to enrich themselves at others’ expense. It means becoming fiercely loyal to what is best in ourselves and each other, to our capacity for compassion and cooperation and courage. Across two centuries, anarchists have resisted under monarchies and persisted through dictatorships. Now that liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism are concluding in a new form of tyranny, a new generation must draw on this long legacy of struggle.

There is no going back to the way things were, to the future that we once anticipated. The old world is in flames around us. Become an anarchist, or forever hold your peace.

The Students Walk Out in Los Angeles : A Report from the Streets

2025-02-13T08:57:19Z

In the opening weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency, some of the fiercest expressions of defiance have come from the communities that Trump is threatening to attack. In Los Angeles, students have engaged in weeks of walkouts and other protests against the mass deportations Trump promised. In Cincinnati, the historically Black community Lincoln Heights responded to a neo-Nazi rally by chasing off the white supremacists, burning their swastika flags, and conducting an armed watch lest they attempt to return.

Both of these communities draw on deep roots of resistance. The students in Los Angeles are walking out in the footsteps of previous student rebels, including those who participated in the historic protests of 2006 against the repression of the undocumented. People in Cincinnati rose in rebellion in 2001 against police violence, foreshadowing the movement that got underway in response to the murder of Oscar Grant in 2008 and arrived on the world stage in 2014 with the uprising in Ferguson. In continuing these legacies, today’s protesters show how difficult it will be for Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and other racist billionaires to control the population of this continent. They also point the way for others who are still trying to figure out how to defend themselves against the new regime.

Here, participants in this month’s demonstrations in Los Angeles offer a short report from the streets.

You can view many other photographs depicting the week’s events by the same photographer here.

Report from Los Angeles

The ongoing anti-ICE protests in downtown Los Angeles have been led by Latino and Latina youth, including striking high school students and fleets of teenagers on 29er BMXes, minibikes, and lowriders. The streets are significantly livelier, compared to the last year of demonstrations protesting the genocide in Gaza. The Los Angeles Police Department has reported several injuries to officers, as well as slashed tires on police vehicles.

Unencumbered by formal speeches and megaphone-driven chants, the participants have instead spent their time setting off fireworks and smoke bombs, doing burnouts at intersections, and chanting “Culero!” at the cops. Anger, frustration, excitement, and joy have mingled in the streets as cumbias and corridos blast from car stereos and live bandas and the smell of burning rubber fills the air.

The events of Sunday, February 2, began at the El Pueblo de Los Angeles historical monument, where thousands rallied with speeches, music, and performances organized by a loose coalition of political organizations and social media influencers. After the performances and speeches, the participants marched to City Hall, where hundreds of people occupied the steps and lawns. The rally formally ended at 11 AM, but the crowd continued to march from City Hall back to El Pueblo de Los Angeles where protesters remained until 11 PM.

This protester’s ensemble succinctly conveys an entire political program. Credit.

It was clear that although the rally was called by formal political organizations, the crowd’s energy quickly exceeded any control they may have had over people’s movement. Crowds took over the 101 freeway in downtown three separate times, leaving the walls painted with “Fuck ICE,” “Brown Pride,” and “Chinga tu Madre Trump!” An estimated three thousand people, including street vendors who flocked in to sustain the protest, held down the blocks between the 101 freeway and Olvera Street all evening, until LAPD eventually used tear gas to disperse the crowd.

According to one participant,

“A crowd of about 100 swarmed an LAPD vehicle, trapping it as they danced cumbia on all sides. Orders to disperse were met with empty cans of beer thrown at police cruisers.”

The next day, on February 3, students across Southern California and in parts of the rest of the country skipped classes and crowds gathered to mark “A Day Without Immigrants,” echoing a 2017 call to protest and boycott in response to the first Trump administration’s rhetorical and material attacks on immigrants. Los Angeles Unified School District attendance was reported at 66%, and traffic on the 101 was temporarily stopped by hundreds of protesters again.

Graffiti on Los Angeles City Hall.

After the previous day’s disordered and timid response to protesters, the LAPD was actively looking for opportunities to escalate and perform arrests. At least one man was arrested on a felony vandalism charge during the demonstrations. Minor skirmishes between protesters and police on February 3, including the use of green-strap 40-millimeter less-than-lethal rounds, culminated in the police kettling a group of 200-250 protesters in a tunnel on Chavez Avenue. At this point, the LAPD faltered, failing to muster and coordinate the necessary resources to carry out mass arrests. The tenacity of the crowd and protesters outside the kettle effectively succeeded in de-escalating the police response; after several hours, the protesters were cited and released.

The strength of these initial protests laid the groundwork for the following week of resistance across Los Angeles County. Student walkouts have happened nearly every day and continue still, with community and mutual aid organizations supporting them. This form of resistance follows in the legacy of the 1968 East Los Angeles Walkouts (also known as the Chicano Blowouts), during which 20,000 high schoolers walked out demanding anti-racist education. The March 2006 rally for immigration reform also saw tens of thousands of students walk out. The energy in the streets and the overall swagger of the protesters recalls the rowdy celebrations after the Dodgers won the World Series in October, which escalated to looting in downtown and the burning of a Metropolitan Transit Authority bus in Echo Park.

You can view more work by this photographer here.

The speed of response, scale, and sustained nature of the protests in Los Angeles were notable. However, marches in San Diego, Phoenix, Austin, and dozens of other cities showed that the draw to make resistance public is not isolated to Southern California. While people have taken to the streets less rapidly than eight years ago, this should not be understood as a public disillusionment with the tactic of mass protest. We don’t have a complete answer for what tactical role street protests should play in the current political moment, but this week in Los Angeles has reminded us that there is still an intoxicating joy to be found in the streets in these collective gatherings of resistance.

And regardless of whether activists, organizations, and organizers call for them—they are going to happen.

The demonstrators at City Hall on February 4, 2025. A video shared by People’s City Council, Los Angeles.

Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE

2025-02-11T23:09:24Z

The Trump administration is paving the way for mass deportations by building new prison camps and invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which was used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Motivated by nativism and white nationalism, Steven Miller and other officials are attempting to ethnically cleanse the United States, while tech and prison companies profit on lucrative government contracts and corporations continue to exploit immigrant labor. Knowing that mass deportations will inflict devastating costs, Trump has chiefly been concentrating his efforts in cities like Chicago and Denver that are governed by his political adversaries.

Nonetheless, people are getting organized. Communities across the US are mobilizing rapid response networks that can respond to raids and support those targeted by state violence. Students across the US are staging walkouts; people are holding mass demonstrations and fighting back against deportations.

If we fail to stand in solidarity with those targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today, the same infrastructure of repression will eventually be turned against others, as well. An injury to one is an injury to all!

Do your part to melt the ICE.

Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE

Click on the image to download the PDF. Please print these out and distribute them in your community!

Know Your Rights—Educate Your Community

Learn your rights in interactions with ICE and law enforcement. Trump officials have complained that people knowing their rights makes it “very difficult” to carry out raids. Asserting our rights can disrupt their plans, delay their efforts, and shift the power dynamics in encounters with law enforcement. Distribute “Know Your Rights” cards and fliers in your community. Organize teams to get them into schools and workplaces. Host a training at your local community center, church, or union hall. Publicizing this information is an chance to get people together to strategize about how to accomplish the other tasks on this list.

Vet Information—Stop Rumors

Disinformation spreads quickly when people are afraid. Set up hotlines, Signal loops, and social media accounts that can vet information, verify reports of ICE activity, and circulate reliable updates. If your area already has a hotline, volunteer to help keep it running. Don’t amplify rumors; when you see them spreading, debunk them. Reports about ICE activity should include the exact time, date, and location of the sighting, the number of agents, and a visual description of their uniforms, vehicles, and badges—or better still, photographic evidence.

For more information, continue reading here.

Organize Rapid Response Networks

Organize a rapid response network to mobilize against ICE raids by recording their activity, providing support to the targeted, and organizing an immediate response. Documenting ICE activity has proven useful for understanding how they behave; it has also helped people in court. Wherever possible, block or slow their actions. In the past, crowds mobilized by rapid response networks have blockaded ICE deportation vans and protested outside ICE facilities.

You can read about some rapid response networks here and here.

Organize Mutual Aid—Support Bail Funds

ICE raids disrupt lives and break families apart. Many people are afraid to attend school or go to work for fear of being kidnapped by ICE. Organize mutual aid programs to provide support to those in hiding and to families whose breadwinners have been abducted. Start a free grocery program. Deliver meals. Connect with existing support networks and organizations to expand their efforts. Support bail funds to get arrestees out of the system as soon as possible.

Fight Criminalization—Shut out the Police

Ordinary interactions with police are one of the chief risks to those targeted by ICE. A single false criminal charge could ruin a person’s life, even if it would never hold up in court. Encourage neighbors and coworkers not to call the police. Organize neighborhood networks, conflict resolution projects, and other ways to address community needs without involving the criminal “justice” industry. Debunk false narratives about rising crime rates—these are just excuses to increase the scope of repression and the profits of those who invest in it. Explain what everyone has to gain by standing in solidarity with those who are on the receiving end of criminalization. Publicly shame police officers and other mercenaries who sell their capacity to inflict harm to the highest bidder.

Stand In Solidarity with ICE Detainees—Fight to Abolish ICE

Stand in solidarity with those locked inside ICE facilities. Support their efforts to organize. Prisoners in many ICE facilities organize hunger strikes and labor stoppages demanding better food, better conditions, access to healthcare, and legal representation. Organize to prevent the construction of new ICE facilities. Mobilize against contractors that work with ICE or supply technology to ICE. Connect the struggle against ICE to other organizing within and against prisons.

Connect Communities

These tactics will be most effective if you pursue them in community with those who are immediately at risk. For example, if you maintain a platform sharing verified sightings of ICE in your community, this will do little good unless it reaches those who need that information most. Strengthen the ties between those who are targeted by ICE and the rest of your community.

Build a Culture of Resistance against ICE and State Repression

Build a culture of resistance in your neighborhood, school, or workplace. Make the walls of your community speak with stickers and posters. Encourage non-cooperation with ICE. Strategize with others in your community about how to support those facing repression and take the offensive against those who are scapegoating the undocumented.

Every time ICE wants to attack your community, they should know that their activity will be recorded and reported, that people will converge on them wherever they show up, that there will be consequences for their actions. Every operation should cost them more resources than the last. If all of us do what we can, the accumulation of our efforts will save lives and preserve communities.

For More Information

Know Your Rights:

You have constitutional rights!

DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR if an immigration agent is knocking on the door.
DO NOT ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS from an immigration agent if they try to talk to you. You have the right to remain silent.
DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING without speaking to a lawyer first. You have the right to speak with a lawyer.
If you are outside of your home, ask the agent if you are free to leave. If they say yes, leave.
GIVE THIS TEXT TO THE AGENT. If you are inside of your home, show the text through the window or slide a card with this text under the door:

I do not wish to speak with you, answer your questions, or sign or hand you any documents based on my 5th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution. I do not give you permission to enter my home based on my 4th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution unless you have a warrant to enter, signed by a judge or magistrate with my name on it that you slide under the door. I do not give you permission to search any of my belongings based on my 4th Amendment rights. I choose to exercise my constitutional rights.

ICE agents often carry administrative rather than judicial warrants. They would like you to think that these are the same, but they are not. If the agent does not have a judicial warrant with all the correct information for the specific person they are looking to detain, they do not have authority to enter private areas without consent, including private areas at a workplace. Talk with your coworkers so that everyone understands which areas are public and private; put up signs and keep doors closed. Create a policy on how to respond if ICE comes to your place of work. You can learn more about how to deal with workplace raids here.

The Day the Émigrés Struck Back : Remembering the General Strike of May Day 2006

2025-02-05T19:53:23Z

In 2006, students around the United States engaged in spontaneous walkouts protesting the repression of undocumented people, culminating on May Day in the first great general strike to take place in the US in the 21st century. Today, as students are once again staging walkouts and people around the country are taking to the streets against the immigration policies of the second Trump administration, it is a good time to revisit this earlier high point of resistance.

The following report originally appeared in issue three of Rolling Thunder, our Anarchist Journal of Dangerous Living.

You can order these stickers here.

May 1, 2006

May Day 2006 saw the first nationwide general strike in the United States in several decades. The immigrant rights movement had declared that fine spring day “A Day without Immigrants,” in response to right-wing rhetoric to the effect that “we don’t need immigrants.” They replied “Ok gringo, if you don’t need us, we’re not going to go to work or school, nor buy or sell anything on this day. Let’s see how well this country runs.”

The strike was a stunning success, despite a number of spineless Latino “leaders” condemning the strike, saying that it would create a backlash and send the wrong message. As if the bill in Congress that would deport twelve million people and militarize the US-Mexico border wasn’t a backlash!

Across the country, immigrants and their allies walked off the job, skipped school, shuttered the windows of their shops, and refused to spend any money. In Phoenix, thousands of workers took the day off and blockaded the entrances to various Walmart and Home Depot stores. Nearly all the chain restaurants in the city had to close or slash their hours due to the strike. Dozens of meatpacking plants, employing thousands of workers, were closed down nationwide due to that industry’s reliance on immigrant labor.

Los Angeles was possibly hardest hit, with a good portion of the city completely shut down. The port of LA, one of the country’s largest, was ninety percent inactive thanks to the overwhelming majority of truckers refusing to haul goods that day. A small but rowdy portion of the more than one million people who marched for immigrant rights in LA chose to round off the day in running battles with the police, throwing rocks and bottles, dragging debris into the streets, and vandalizing outdoor advertisements. California’s state legislature was forced to close when janitors, cafeteria workers, and maintenance people did not show up to work at the capitol building. Meanwhile, across the country, the New York state legislature shut down mid-session when Black and Latino legislators walked out in solidarity with the protest. Back in California, the agricultural counties were hit particularly hard, with major corporate farms such as Gallo Wines being forced to halt production for the day.

A riot broke out in Santa Ana, CA when police tried to disperse a crowd of fifteen hundred that had taken over a major boulevard. The crowd responded by raining bottles and rocks on the cops, who were forced to retreat until a riot squad was brought in to quell the revolt. In New York City, scuffles broke out with police when a crowd thousands strong attempted to take the Brooklyn Bridge.

Nearly half a million people marched through the streets of Chicago, and another one hundred thousand marched in Denver, where it was reported that scuffles broke out between protestors and Minutemen counter-protestors. Several hundred cities and small towns across the country experienced demonstrations, many of them the largest those cities had ever seen.

In a sign that the immigrant rights movement may be diversifying, the windows of a Department of Homeland Security office in Santa Cruz responsible for deporting immigrants were shattered overnight. According to a message posted on the internet, dozens of banks and “financial institutions” saw their locks glued and ATM machines sabotaged in western North Carolina, in an apparent move to support the general strike.

South of the border, throughout Mexico, hundreds of thousands of people observed a sister day of protest labeled “A Day without a Gringo,” in which Mexicans boycotted all US business interests. Mexico City saw a crowd of several thousand gather to listen to Zapatista leader Marcos speak and to show their solidarity with their brothers and sisters struggling north of the border. Afterwards, several hundred demonstrators took a tour of the business district, smashing the windows of US-owned banks and restaurants. In Monterey, a group of women gave out free tacos in front of a McDonald’s in an effort to support the boycott. Meanwhile, every major border crossing from El Paso to San Diego was shut down by groups of angry Mexican citizens on their side of the border, preventing hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of goods from crossing the border that day.

All in all, May Day 2006 was one of the largest days of protest the United States had ever seen. Counting Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and Washington, DC alone, there were nearly two million people in the streets, with an equal or greater number joining in smaller demonstrations elsewhere across the US. It was a day of protest based on the principles of direct action, the centerpiece of which was a general strike. In many places, demonstrators went further, blockading businesses that exploit immigrants and engaging the police in battles when push came to shove.

It was fitting that it was immigrants who brought May Day back to its former splendor. It was here in the United States, in Chicago, that this international day of workers’ solidarity was born in the struggle for the eight-hour day. Radical immigrant workers, the majority of them anarchists, were at the front of the struggles that made May Day what it is, offering their tears, sweat, and blood in the fight for a better way of life.

Appendix: How It Began

This contemporary account by an outside sympathizer offers a snapshot of the momentum that led to the general strike of May Day 2006 and a glimpse of political discourse about immigrants’ struggles at that time.

Early in 2006, I was riding my bike through downtown Tucson on my way to write a story about recent Indigenous uprisings on a faraway island in Indonesia. My mind was occupied by mundane worries: low air pressure on the rear tire, cars driving too close to me, wondering if I was getting skin cancer from so much sun.

I had nearly completed my daily pilgrimage to the office when these trivial thoughts were interrupted by a sea of people moving steadily in my direction from several blocks away. There was joyful shouting, people carrying indistinguishable flags and banners. “Wasn’t Saint Patrick’s day last week?” I thought to myself. As I neared the energetic crowd, I soon realized this was no state-sanctioned holiday, and it sure as hell had nothing to do with the Irish.

Instead, I saw two or three hundred mostly Latino youth marching defiantly down the street. Recalling the numerous record-breaking protests against racist anti-immigrant laws of the past week, I realized I had run into a student walkout.

As I neared the next block, I was amazed to find a group of three hundred students already rallying in front of the federal building. Over the next half hour, the crowd swelled to over a thousand as more and more fugitive students arrived in groups of ten, fifty, a hundred. The energy and excitement of these youthful rebels nearly overwhelmed me as their chants of “¡Si se puede!” (“Yes, it can be done!”) rang through the air, at times drowned out by the constant honking of supportive passersby. Others chanted “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” in reference to the United States’ arbitrary heist of the northern portion of Mexico over a century ago. Still more carried signs reading “No human being is illegal.”

The following day, I was again riding my bike through downtown, somewhat more prepared to run into a protest, because I had heard that students were planning another walkout. I was disappointed when I encountered a small crowd of fifty kids walking on the sidewalk. “I guess they let their steam out yesterday,” I thought pessimistically to myself. As I rounded the corner onto Congress Avenue, I was forced to eat my words. The crowd was nearly double the size of the previous day’s, overflowing the small plaza in front of the federal building into the streets. The initial fifty were just stragglers. Soon, the massive crowd surged towards the federal courthouse, where thousands of immigrants are deported every year, and proceeded to block the entrance to this institution of oppression for half an hour. Meanwhile, hundreds of other students cruised the streets of downtown in perilously overloaded vehicles, blasting the music of their home countries, waving Mexican flags, and carrying posters of Cesar Chavez. Whether or not it was intentional, these cruisers, in conjunction with the sea of protestors swarming downtown from all directions, brought Tucson’s business district to a standstill.

The energy, defiance, and sheer power of these demonstrations stands in stark contrast to the dreary, well-behaved, state-approved parades put on by our country’s numerous leftist organizations. “These are no mere protests,” I thought to myself, “this is an uprising.” This initial speculation was confirmed when I got back home and looked at the news reports. Even the corporate media acknowledged that well over a thousand Tucson middle- and high-school students had dropped their pens and paper and taken to the streets to protest the government’s attempted crackdown on immigration. At one school, someone pulled a fire alarm after the principle attempted to direct students into the gymnasium, ensuring their escape to the streets. At another school, several dozen students scaled a barbed wire fence after administrators locked the only exit shut. Other students took their anger out on the Border Patrol, notorious for its rampant racism and sadistic abuse of detainees, by throwing rocks at its Tucson headquarters.

What I saw in Tucson was no isolated incident. In Los Angeles, thirty-six thousand students walked out three days in a row, shut down four freeways, and repeatedly clashed with the LAPD when the latter attempted to break up this spontaneous outbreak of rebellion. In Fort Worth, Texas, not exactly a hotbed of radicalism, several hundred students walked out and proceeded to take over the city hall. Police responded by injuring several students, one of whom required hospitalization. There’s nothing like a group of grown-up armed men beating school children! In Pasadena, California, police opened up on a crowd of one hundred and fifty students with pepper balls in an attempt to disperse them. The students responded to this unprovoked attack by throwing rocks and bottles at the police.

In San Diego, six thousand students took to the streets in five days of class disruptions. On the final day, they attempted to take over the Coronado bridge that spans San Diego Bay, but were stopped by a wall of California Highway Patrolmen. In Santa Ana, student occupations shut down several government offices, including the tax collector’s office.

“No human being is illegal.”

This massive wave of civil disobedience on the heels of the previous week’s pro-immigrant demonstrations is no doubt a sign of a healthy and rapidly growing national rebellion. Where do predominately white anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial movements in this country fit into the picture?

First off, gringos need to understand that immigrants to the US are for the most part fleeing the poverty, hunger, and violent repression manufactured abroad by our country’s government in order to ensure the relative comfort of our lives here at home. It is no coincidence that the “flood” of illegal immigrants from Mexico skyrocketed after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The human beings who are risking their lives (several hundred die every year) traversing the arid borderlands are not doing so to steal people’s jobs. They are trying to ensure the survival of their families by earning slightly more than the starvation wages they find, if they are lucky, south of the border.¹

Radicals in the US should extend solidarity to the immigrant rights movement in every way possible. This is not the time for professional activists to step up and “show the masses the way.” The folks fueling the fire of this uprising seem to have a pretty clear analysis of the situation and an equally clear vision of how to win. The last thing they need is some know-it-all honkies to come in and tell them what to do. If you need further convincing of this fact, consider that the immigrant rights movement has managed in a matter of weeks to mobilize an enormous and militant movement that is already beginning to surpass what the anti-war movement, with the “help” of all those well-paid professional activists, has accomplished in the past three years.

Sympathetic gringos can offer direct assistance by cooking food for demonstrators, hanging posters, organizing solidarity actions, offering rides to demonstrations and meetings, acting as legal observers, raising funds for legal expenses (hundreds have already been arrested for acts of civil disobedience), and showing up to demonstrations.

One role I believe we have a particular responsibility to play is confronting racist boneheads such as the Minutemen who have spearheaded the massive anti-immigrant backlash. The sheer idiocy of anyone of European descent in North America complaining about illegal immigrants is maddening enough—but when these bigots start walking around with guns to “protect the borders of the US” as a code for promoting their racist ideals, and receive significant backing from prominent Republicans and the media in return, we have a duty to stop them. Wherever these racist thugs hold a rally, we should organize a larger counter-rally. Whenever they organize a meeting, we should be there to disrupt it. Those of us who live near the border can interfere with their “civilian border patrols” by warning would-be crossers of their presence. (A megaphone and a spotlight will help.)

We can show our solidarity by continuing to fight the colonialist policies that have impoverished other countries and created this whole immigration “problem” in the first place. Shutting down the World Trade Organization in Seattle was a good start, but we totally dropped the ball on NAFTA and CAFTA (the equivalent agreement for Central America). However, it is not too late to defeat the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and resistance to it throughout the rest of the continent is still fierce. I reckon it’s never too late to get the other two repealed either. While welcoming economic and political refugees into our country is a good start, if we want to create a truly just world for everyone, we must destroy the policies that force people to make the trek in the first place.

You can obtain these posters here.

Radicals must address the anti-immigrant sentiment that sometimes boils up within our own ranks—for example, in certain sectors of the environmental movement. Groups such as the Sierra Club have flirted for years with the asinine notion that poor immigrants are somehow a major source of ecological destruction in the US. The line of logic proceeds thus: the increase in population is causing major sprawl, and by moving to the US—hold your breath for this one—immigrants start to consume at the rate that US citizens do. If I understand this right, it’s OK for us to continue consuming the world’s resources at a suicidal rate, but not for anyone else to? Talk about blaming the victim! Instead of scapegoating immigrants, we should be working first and foremost to reduce our own consumption of resources.

It is equally ridiculous to allege that immigrants cause sprawl. They are not the ones building the second and third trophy homes that are eating up wilderness across the country. Come to think of it, they often are the ones building these homes—not for themselves, but for the exorbitant lifestyles of middle- and upper-class US citizens. Don’t even get me started on the devastation that the massive border wall that some are calling for would have on the ecological integrity of the Sonoran desert ecosystem.

Radical immigrant groups that are fighting for better wages and work conditions in the US also deserve support. Groups such as the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) have both launched numerous protests, boycotts, and speaking tours to achieve better pay in the fields. During FLOC’s boycott of Mt. Olive pickles, anarchists in North Carolina helped by protesting at grocery stores (including trashing Mt. Olive products in the store), painting banners, and offering rides to FLOC organizers who did not have documentation or driver’s licenses. The CIW recently won in a boycott against Taco Bell demanding that they pay tomato pickers more per pound, and have just launched a fresh boycott against McDonalds hoping to achieve the same goal. I’m sure you can think of a number of ways to help compel McDonalds to meet their demands.

Comida no Migra—“food, not border patrol”—is a new take on the Food Not Bombs model that is catching on in many communities across the US. Instead of serving lunch or dinner in the park, participants get up early in the morning to bring food to immigrant day laborers at the places where they wait for work. Not only does this provide folks with a little sustenance and good cheer, it also puts observers on site to make sure no one messes with them. This is important because the Minutemen, not knowing what else to do with their pathetic lives, have started protesting at day labor sites to intimidate immigrants. Similarly, it’s not unheard of for immigrants to get picked up by some asshole, work all day, and then not get paid; even worse, there have been incidents in which racists have picked up day laborers and beaten or killed them.

There is a lot of work to be done in the fight for immigrant rights. Whether that means offering childcare to families so that they can attend meetings, translating information on workers’ rights into Spanish, or blockading immigration detention centers, there are many fronts in this battle and all of them are important.

It would behoove radicals in the US to study the solidarity work people in Europe and Australia have done around immigration and asylum seeking. Check out the No Border network—a massive European immigrants’ rights coalition. In Australia, activists have repeatedly broken political asylum-seekers out of detention centers and provided them refuge.

There is much we can offer. The fight for immigrant rights is not about us and how radical our politics are. It is about lending our solidarity to people in struggle.

Click on the image to download the poster.

Even if they were just “here for a free ride,” as the right wing asserts, I’d say good for them. After all we’ve stolen from them and the places they came from, it’s merely a matter of them coming and getting a little piece of the pie back—in other words, reparations. ↩

It's Safer in the Front : Taking the Offensive against Tyranny

2025-01-28T22:57:33Z

Faced with intensifying repression and state violence, there is an understandable inclination to seek safety by avoiding confrontation. But this is not always the most effective strategy.

“Counterintuitive though it is, in a confusing situation, often the best, if not safest, place to be is the front lines, so you can get a clear visual grasp of what is going on around you.”

-“What I Do for a Living,” an account from the demonstrations against the 2003 European Union summit in Thessaloniki, published in Rolling Thunder #1.

My friend’s grandfather grew up in Germany in the 1920s. Being Jewish, he got involved in radical organizations and sometimes engaged in physical altercations with Nazis. In a memoir that he recorded for his family decades later, he describes the situation when the Nazis took power:

“In January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. I thought we would now start a revolution, but actually nothing happened. The communists defected—often en masse—to the Nazis and the social democrats held out a little longer but ultimately dissolved their organizations.”

In May 1933, when he was twenty years old, he learned that he was about to be prosecuted for having broken a Nazi’s nose in a street brawl. Rather than face trial in a judicial system controlled by Nazis, he immediately obtained a passport and boarded a train for Holland that same night at 8 pm.

Some years later, the rest of his family died in the concentration camp in Auschwitz.

This story succinctly illustrates a surprisingly common phenomenon. Had my friend’s grandfather not participated in open confrontations with Nazis from the very beginning, had he kept his head down and avoided trouble, he probably would have remained in Berlin and met the same fate as his relatives. By taking the offensive, he put himself in harm’s way—but paradoxically, in the long run, that worked out better than playing it safe.

Likewise, participants in the guerrilla underground of the Jewish resistance were among the only ones to survive the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. In organizing to meet the Nazi threat head on, they developed a robust relationship to their agency, and this served them well when the only way out was to organize a daring escape from the besieged and burning ghetto through the sewer system.

For members of targeted groups, the initial impulse is often to withdraw, to go into hiding. Yet when it comes to both individual and collective self-preservation, it can be wiser to act assertively at the beginning, while it is still possible to influence the course of events. Even if this goes badly, it can be better to bring the conflict to a head immediately, before one’s adversary becomes more powerful. If nothing else, this strategy has the virtue of making it impossible to lull oneself into a false sense of security while the threat increases.

It doesn’t always work out this way, but sometimes, it’s safer in the front.

“There’s no reason to sleep curled up and bent. It’s not comfortable, it’s not good for you, and it doesn’t protect you from danger. If you’re worried about an attack, you should stay awake or sleep lightly with limbs unfurled for action.” Artwork by Jenny Holzer.

It was noon on April 20, 2001. My comrades and I had assembled alongside hundreds of other anarchists and anti-capitalists at Laval University in Québec City to march on a transcontinental summit intended to establish a “Free Trade Area of the Americas.” In the center of town, behind miles of protective fencing and thousands of riot police, George W. Bush and his fellow heads of state were plotting to override labor laws and environmental protections to enrich their patrons at our expense.

The sun was shining. More and more people were arriving at the departure point. One group even rolled up a catapult. The police were nowhere to be seen.

Still, I was anxious. Most of my experience of violence was subcultural—fighting skinheads, hardcore shows. I’d never taken on an army of police before. At a meeting the preceding evening, a local organizer had told us that it would be impossible to reach the fence around the summit—there were just too many cops with too much armor and weaponry.

As the crowd began to make its way out of the university towards the street, I consulted with a more experienced comrade. “Should we hang back and see what happens?” I asked.

“If we want to be able to see what’s happening, we’ll have to be in the front,” he answered, matter-of-factly.

We marched directly to the fence surrounding the summit and tore it down. The police could not stop us. The “Free Trade Area of the Americas” was never ratified.

Anarchists marching on the so-called “Summit of the Americas” in Québec City, April 2001.

My friend’s advice served me well four years later, on the day that George W. Bush began his second term. That night, following the daytime march against the inaugural ceremonies, a second march surged through the neighborhood of Adams Morgan, smashing banks and corporate businesses and attacking a police substation. Some participants dropped an enormous banner across a building façade reading “From DC to Iraq—with occupation comes resistance.” We were attempting to compel the Bush regime to end the occupation of Iraq, which inflicted countless civilian casualties and later contributed to the catastrophic rise of the Islamic State.

As the march dispersed, a comrade and I found ourselves among a number of people walking through an alley. Ahead of us, police officers appeared at the exit.

We could have turned around and run the other direction. But then we would have been at the back of the crowd, unable to see what we were running towards. “Run, run forward,” I said to my companion. We were already running.

We dashed past the cops just as they closed their line across the mouth of the alley. “Don’t let any more of them out,” I heard one bark to another.

We were the last ones to escape. The police had blocked the alley from the other side, as well. They forced the people behind us to kneel in the snow for hours. Years later, the detainees won a settlement from the city, but it was better to get away.

Washington, DC, January 20, 2005.

On August 25, 2008, in Denver, during the demonstrations against the Democratic National Convention, a couple hundred people gathered for a march that had been announced but never organized. We were still protesting against the ongoing occupation of Iraq and against capitalism in general.

Armored police were positioned in groups of a dozen each all around the park and the surrounding streets, outnumbering the young people sitting around with black sweatshirts in their laps. A vehicle was supposed to deliver banners, but a rumor reached us that police had detained the driver. Yet just when it seemed certain that nothing was going to happen, a few young folks pulled up their hoods and began chanting.

Who are these people? I recall wondering. What are they thinking, masking up and linking arms with hundreds of riot police surrounding them and undercovers at their elbows? What can they hope to accomplish?

Nonetheless, the other people who had gathered for the march regrouped with them and they began marching out of the park. They only made it as far as the road, where the nearest squadron of police formed a line blocking their path and showered them with pepper spray. No protest had occurred yet, I had heard no dispersal order, and already the police were using chemical weapons.

A comrade and I watched all this with dismay. There were still about two hundred of us, but the police were closing in from all sides and the crowd was disoriented and uncoordinated. It was a recipe for disaster.

We were at the back of the crowd. But the back can become the front—it’s just a question of initiative. My comrade began shouting out a countdown. Others joined in, instinctively. Counting together concentrated our attention, our expectations, our sense of ourselves as a collective force capable of concerted action. And then thirty of us were sprinting over the grass away from the police line.

Seeing this, the rest of the crowd fell in behind. In a few seconds, hundreds of people were running across the park to the intersection at the far side of the lawn, where police had not gathered yet.

Now the energy in the air was electric, in contrast to the malaise and uncertainty of a moment earlier. We passed through the intersection, into which some enterprising young people pulled a municipal sign reading “Road Closed”—and suddenly, we were approaching the business district.

The same principle served us well later in the evening when we saw a line of riot police fanning out across an intersection a block ahead. Without pausing to confer, my comrade and I bolted towards them. We reached the line of police and dodged between them before they could block our path. They had orders to create a barrier, not to chase us. We were safe.

Denver, August 25, 2008.

On the morning of January 20, 2017, another comrade and I joined the march in downtown Washington, DC opposing the inauguration of Donald Trump. In the decades that had passed since Bush’s second inauguration, police all around the country had militarized, receiving bigger and bigger budgets even as politicians claimed there was no money available for anything else. This time, the streets were crowded with 28,000 law enforcement personnel.

There was open conflict with the police as soon as the march got underway. The wail of police sirens, the deafening explosions of flash-bang grenades at close quarters, the acrid scent of pepper spray, the roar of police motorcycles, the sizzle of adrenaline—it was a terrifying situation, but the demonstrators around us were giving as good as they were getting. The idea was to set a template for resistance on the first day of the Trump administration, sending the message to everyone that no one should passively accept the intensification of tyranny.

The longer we were in the streets, the more dangerous it got. When we passed Franklin Square again, doubling back on our tracks, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before we were surrounded.

In downtown DC, between the intersections, the streets are like long stretches of canyon between the cliff faces of the buildings. I knew the police wanted to box us in and kettle us. Every time we passed through an intersection, I glanced at the intersections a block away on either side to see if police were shadowing us on the parallel streets, preparing to cut off our exit routes. Every time we moved out of an intersection into another stretch of canyon, I watched the intersections ahead and behind for police. Whenever we were moving between intersections, we were vulnerable.

As we approached 13th Street, police on motorcycles passed us on the sidewalk on our left, attempting to overtake us and seize the intersection ahead. We were still hundreds of feet from it. I urged my companion to run ahead with me, and we sprinted past front of the march, past the bike cops and motorcycle cops, who began ramming their vehicles into the people immediately behind us. When the cops saw that a few of us were already at their backs, they gave up trying to form a line and once again focused on racing ahead of us. Police hate to be outflanked—they can’t risk being surrounded themselves.

The clash at the intersection showed that the march was no longer in control of the territory around it. It was time to make our exit. We ran down an alley on our right shortly before the next intersection. A hundred others did the same. Those who continued forward were blocked by a line of police at the next intersection, and turned around only to discover a much stronger police line blocking them from behind.

For two long minutes, the crowd paused in confusion and dismay. Some people towards the back of the march had already taken off their gear and were hoping to pass as civilians in order to make their way out of the area, not realizing that they were already trapped from all sides.

The participants at the front of the march kept their gear on and linked arms. Someone called out “We’re going to do a countdown!” They counted down quickly from ten to one and charged directly at the police line ahead of them. The person at the very front of the charge held open a flimsy umbrella as they all ran blindly forward. Somehow, the umbrella protected them from the answering stream of pepper spray.

Fifty of them broke through the police line and escaped. The ones who lingered, waiting to see whether the charge would break through before joining it, remained trapped in the kettle.

Someone later posted a humorous comment on social media to the effect that the cheat code for the J20 Protest Simulator was to be always running at the cops holding a hammer. But there was something to it. Afterwards, watching police footage released to defendants in the subsequent court case, we saw that even after the police and National Guardsmen had tightened up their line, one enterprising individual had escaped simply by sprinting as fast as possible directly at them and ducking between two of them.

Everyone who was detained was charged with eight felonies apiece—up to eighty years in prison—for the crime of being mass-arrested in the vicinity of a rowdy march. A few took plea deals, but everyone else stuck together, establishing a collective defense plan and confronting the legal system head on. In the end, after two trials at which all the defendants were declared not guilty, all of the remaining defendants saw their charges dropped. Years later, all of them received payouts from the state to settle the resulting lawsuits.

It sounds like a metaphor, but I mean it literally as well as figuratively. Whether it’s a march or a court case, sometimes it’s safer in the front.

Washington, DC, January 20, 2017.

Several years later, I was in Atlanta for the Block Cop City mobilization. Protesters had been trying to stop the construction of a multi-million-dollar facility to further militarize the police. In retaliation, the police had murdered one person and arrested a large number of people at random, charging them with terrorism and indicting sixty-one of them on trumped-up racketeering charges.

Before the action proper, there were two days of deliberations at a local Quaker community center. Everyone was on edge. The goal was to try to march into the forest and occupy the construction site. Would we all be arrested? Would we, too, be charged with terrorism and racketeering? The discussions went in circles as people fruitlessly attempted to predict what would happen and negotiated their own risk tolerance.

It was decided that there would be three self-organized blocs within the march: essentially, the front, the middle, and the back. Officially, this distinction was not based on anticipated risk, because the organizers could make no promises about what the police would do. But no one was able to consider which bloc to join without panning back to larger questions. How much do I fear the violence of the police and the judicial system? What am I prepared to sacrifice for this movement?

Only the bold few who had made peace with their fears and committed to taking the front of the march seemed at ease. Even within the “middle” bloc, there was a lot of agonizing and bargaining going on. “I’ll be in the middle, but not at the front of the middle…”

That night, I explained to my family what to do if I didn’t come home from the demonstration. Both of my romantic partners, independently of each other, asked me whether it was really that important for me to participate in this particular march. Couldn’t I just leave it to the younger activists?

It’s safer in the front. I remembered this saying from earlier mobilizations—but thinking it over, I wasn’t so sure. How could it be safer to charge directly into police lines? The slogan distilled lessons drawn on my own experience, but heading into yet another dangerous situation, I was dubious.

On the morning of the mobilization, we assembled at the park. Despite a few festive flourishes, the atmosphere was somber: a few hundred people risking injury, arrest, and prison time for the honor of an embattled movement. Many people had decided to stay home at the last minute. We marched out of the park in a column, everyone assiduously sticking to their particular position in the risk tolerance spectrum. As long as we were marching down the narrow pedestrian walkway, this made sense, but it made less sense when we emerged onto the main road and advanced towards the construction site. We should have fanned out to present a broad front as we approached the lines of police and armored vehicles blocking the road, but no, the crowd stretched out into what was almost single-file line, like lambs lining up for slaughter.

Nonetheless, the ones at the front picked up speed, forming a V-shaped wedge with their reinforced banners and pointing their umbrellas forward to block the cops’ view as they charged directly into the shields of the skirmish line. The rest of us dragged along behind, holding the positions we had committed to holding—no less, and no more.

People assembling to begin the Block Cop City march, November 13, 2023.

The people with the reinforced banners pushed the first line of cops back until it was reinforced by a second line. Even then, they didn’t relent; they kept on pushing forward against the police. The cops lashed out with their batons, but went on losing ground. The bloc at the front of the march stuck together, protecting each other, acting deliberately. Maybe they were afraid, but it wasn’t fear that was determining their actions.

Looking on from behind them, I was terrified. I was grateful I wasn’t in the front, having to make decisions. Police batons are scary, jail time is scary, felony charges are scary, but the truly frightening thing is responsibility. People will accept a lot of negative consequences in their lives just to avoid responsibility. And unfortunately, it’s impossible: try as we might, there is no avoiding the fact that as long as we are able to make decisions and take action, we are responsible for ourselves. That is true whether you position yourself at the front or at the back, or even if you don’t show up at all.

I watched the front-liners ahead of me push both lines of police back until they reached a third line comprised of futuristic stormtroopers. No sign of the stormtroopers’ humanity was discernible beneath their military gear; not even their eyes were visible. They had withdrawn themselves from the human community completely.

The stormtroopers pulled out tear gas canisters. I watched in disbelief as they tossed the canisters one after another over the heads of the ones at the front into the middle of the march—into the midst of those of us who had hoped that others would run risks on our behalf, who had intended simply to be an appendage of others’ agency. Perhaps it would have been safer in the front, after all?

Then everything vanished in a poisonous white haze.

We staggered blindly back in disarray, choking and coughing. But the stormtroopers had gassed the rest of the cops, as well, and the other cops were not wearing gas masks. They, too, had retreated. Against all odds, the battle concluded in a draw.

In the end, the only person who was arrested that entire day was someone who had opted to play a support role far from the site of the action. They were detained in a vehicle near the park from which we had set out. No one was charged with terrorism or racketeering.

In all our anxiety, we had forgotten the greatest risk of all: that we might do nothing, that we would let ourselves be cowed into abandoning the streets. With so many people already facing outlandish charges, marching on the construction site was a risky proposition—but permitting the state to crush the movement would have set a precedent that would threaten other movements, emboldening the authorities to use the same tactics elsewhere against many others like us.

Sometimes you can only find out what the risks are by taking a chance. This time, we had gotten lucky. But in a way, we had also passed a test.

Anarchists at the May Day demonstration in Bandung, 2019. Photograph by Frans Ari Prasetyo.

It’s not really safer in the front. Staying home is safer—at least, it’s safer until the long-term consequences of abandoning the streets set in. Then nowhere is safe, and it turns out it would have been better to take some smaller risks earlier on.

The anti-fascists who went to Charlottesville in August 2017 to confront the “Unite the Right” rally were putting themselves in harm’s way. One of them was killed; several of them were severely injured. But if they had stayed home, if they had permitted fascists to establish control of the streets, the whole world would have become more dangerous. The likelihood that we may be forced to fight that same battle all over again today does not diminish the fact that they won us eight precious years of relative safety.

Even when all really is hopelessly lost, it is generally better to act boldly, sending a signal flare of hope across the generations, the way the Communards and the Kronstadt rebels did. In so doing, you at least preserve the possibility that others will be inspired to continue attempting to build the world you desire, so that one day, your dream might be realized—even if without you, at least due in part to your efforts.

But that’s not where we are today. We face powerful adversaries, but the majority of people, including many of their supporters, have good reason to oppose them alongside us. If we bring people together, if we demonstrate effective ways to fight back, putting our own risk tolerance at the disposal of larger struggles, many more people will eventually join us. There’s no reason to hasten into glorifying martyrdom or accepting defeat when the future is unwritten.

Not everyone can be in the front all the time, of course. It can be exhausting. But the front isn’t a spatial location. Understood properly, it doesn’t necessarily require a particular kind of physical ability or skillset. It’s a way of engaging with events, of remaining focused on our agency, taking the initiative wherever we can rather than just reacting to our opponents’ initiatives. Everyone can open up a new front of struggle by identifying a vulnerability in the ruling order and going on the offensive. The more fronts there are, the safer we all will be.

Facing the second administration of Donald Trump, many anarchists and anti-fascists don’t know where to begin. During the previous Trump administration, we fought hard against an adversary that was much more powerful than us, and won—only to find victory snatched from our hands by cowardly Democrats, who eagerly took over where the Republicans left off, disappointing so many people that Trump was able to return to power. But that is no reason to give up, this time around—it just shows that all along, we were right about the nature of power, and we owe it to the world to demonstrate a real alternative.

In countries ruled by fascism or other forms of despotism, the majority of people do not necessarily support the authorities; they have simply become dispirited, accustomed to passivity. Much more so than liberals, anarchists are used to being outnumbered and outgunned, to fighting against incredible odds. While Democrats make excuses for the fascists or even embrace their agenda, we should demonstrate that it is possible to take ambitious, principled action to resist.

If you feel despair, if you feel defeated, if you catch yourself dissociating or focusing on what our oppressors are doing rather than on what you can do yourself—that is territory that the enemy has claimed within you.

Give them nothing without a fight. Stay focused on your agency. Every hour, every day, wherever you are positioned, there is always something you can do. Take care of yourself and those around you. Keep your eyes out for opportunities and seize them. We are in a fight—but it is a fight that we can win. It’s safer in the front.

The umbrella charge on January 20, 2017.

Reports from the Festivals of Resistance / Day of the Forest Defender

2025-01-20T01:04:50Z

January 18 is the Day of the Forest Defender, honoring the life of Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, who was murdered by Georgia State Troopers two years ago while protesting the construction of Cop City in Atlanta, and everyone else who has given their lives in the fight against those who would render the earth uninhabitable in the course of their pursuit of profit. This year, a call circulated for people to organize festivals of resistance in their communities on the weekend of January 17-19. Here, we share reports from some of these events.

The situation is grim. Despite acknowledging that Trump represents fascism, Democrats have nonetheless welcomed the arrival of despotism, dutifully voting for new legislation targeting immigrants and doing their best to keep protesters out of the streets. Tech CEOs have followed suit, pouring millions of dollars into his inauguration and crowding into St. John’s Church to worship at the feet of their new master.

Elon Musk made the Nazi salute twice from the podium during the inauguration, leaving only just enough plausible deniability to confuse the most naïve. Musk has posted fascist dog whistles on Twitter before, even before he purchased it in order to reintroduce Nazis to the platform, ban anarchists, and promote the fascist agenda.

From this point forward, nothing should surprise us. The incoming government has made it clear that they intend to inflict as much harm as possible on those who are vulnerable while concentrating as much money as possible in the hands of the ultra-rich. These are the central points of their agenda. Attempting to spread information about their misdeeds in order to provoke popular outrage is a waste of time. From here out, all that matters is developing the capacity to defend each other from their attacks while preparing to go on the offensive as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

The faces of the oligarchy looked craven and servile as they lined up at the inauguration to toady to Trump. Capitalism concentrates power in the hands of the most rapacious, but they can only hold on to power by being completely subservient to its demands.

Fortunately, not everyone is taking this sitting down. Anarchists around the country called for “festivals of resistance” the weekend before the inauguration in order to bring communities together prepare to resist. Here follow reports from a few of these. You can read the original call to organize festivals of resistance here, along with a list of dozens of events around the country.

January 11

Sacramento, Chicago, and a few other locations hosted events a weekend early, building up momentum.

Sacramento, California

On Saturday, January 11, well over 600 people came together in downtown Sacramento for a community gathering at a local Methodist Church featuring workshops, skillshares, info-tables, and a key-note address from anarchist author and mutual aid organizer Dean Spade. The previous night, people had gathered to write letters to political prisoners. On the day of the event, hundreds streamed into the building, dramatically outnumbering the nearby Trump rally at the capitol, which brought out only a hundred people.

The workshops included basic first aid, tenant organizing, food autonomy, anti-fascist organizing, community self-defense, and mutual aid. Dean Spade spoke for over an hour on mutual aid organizing with the recent fires in Los Angeles in mind, and also talked about how we need to change the broader culture in our movements, bringing in more people and creating a home for people to grow in through different cycles of struggle.

The event featured a well-organized security team and several zine tables and distros. No major problems occurred. So much pizza was ordered from a local business that the owner told one organizer, “This is bigger than Dave Matthew’s Band.” Crash into this, Dave!

January 17-19

Over two dozen cities hosted Festivals of Resistance this past weekend.

Brooklyn, New York

From noon until after 10 pm, the Interference Archive hosted a marathon of presentations and skillshares aimed at bringing people together and building capacity within New York City’s radical communities. The Archive collects and displays ephemera from social movements; it was covered in banners, posters, communiqués, and other material from the Stop Cop City/Defend the Atlanta Forest movement as part of its ongoing exhibit, “This is Not a Local Struggle.”

The event opened with a moment of silence for Tortuguita. Then, over a dozen local groups and autonomous organizers gave trainings on topics including tenant and union organizing, protest and jail support tactics, and proposals for peoples’ assemblies and other new political formations, coalescing into a conversation about how to oppose the city’s prison expansion plan. The event ended with a community dinner, followed by a screening of several short documentaries about land defenders in Atlanta and Louisiana.

Elsewhere in Brooklyn, people courageously redecorated a billboard. Here follows their statement.

Footage of the billboard in Brooklyn.

Today, thousands of people across the world organized events and took collective action in honor of Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, who was murdered by Georgia State Troopers two years ago while protesting the construction of Cop City in Atlanta. Tortuguita died defending the Weelaunee Forest. January 18, the Day of the Forest Defender, commemorates their 26 years on this earth and their steadfast commitment to collective liberation. Their spirit is alive in our resistance.

We, the writers of this message, took over a billboard on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, one of NYC’s largest highways, used by 130,000 vehicles daily. We covered a CopShot police billboard—that recruits informants with a $10,000 bribe—with a tribute to Tortuguita and all land defenders. In the context of a city that spends $29 million dollars a day on policing, off the side of a highway that displaced thousands of families with a stroke of a pen, we replace the state’s cowardly propaganda with a commemoration of land defenders’ sacrifice and struggle. Collective memory animates our will to destroy this empire that is killing us and our planet. As the US funnels billions into building Cop Cities across the country in its latest attempt to repress us, they concede what we already know—that rebellion is inevitable.

Viva Tortuguita and all land defenders. We will destroy this empire, with Earth as our witness.

The billboard before it was improved.

Cleveland, Ohio

In Cleveland, dozens of people gathered in a snowstorm to occupy a park and demonstrate our determination to build a world that works for everyone. Gathering around a banner reading “No matter who is in power, we keep us safe,” we held space near a busy intersection where people freely shared their experiences of a failed system and imagined the better world that we can build. This occupation was preceded by an indoor direct action training, allowing folks to hone the skills required to move forward. After the occupation, members of the community gathered indoors to discuss our collective needs and ongoing efforts to meet them, forming new connections and deepening existing ones. The day concluded with a documentary screening by the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World].

These events were organized by a newly formed group of anarchists that includes both experienced folks and individuals new to the movement. While the formation of this group was occasioned by calls for a Festival of Resistance, those involved are determined to cultivate the connections formed, building a group that fosters ties within the community and facilitates future actions, building our capacity for future resistance.

A projection at the entry to the Festival of Resistance in central North Carolina.

Durham, North Carolina

The weekend opened with a concert and dance party on Friday night. On Saturday, the Festival of Resistance in Durham, North Carolina drew 300 people for four hours of workshops running two or three at a time. Visitors could take their fill of free material from a dozen literature tables representing various mutual aid and community defense groups; some of those have been around for years or decades, while others emerged out of the assemblies that followed the election in November. Food Not Bombs provided a full hot meal, there was a busy childcare space.

The events continued on Sunday with four more hours of workshops in Chapel Hill, followed by a screening of a film about Rojava that concluded with a discussion featuring the director.

A short video collage about the Festival of Resistance in central North Carolina.

Gary, Indiana

Following up outreach events in Chicago, more than 75 people gathered outside the Gary/Chicago International Airport to demonstrate against the role that it plays in deportations, which Trump has been threatening to ramp up as part of his program of doing harm to undocumented people.

You can read one report on the action in Gary here:

The Gary/Chicago International Airport has been used since at least 2013 to fly deportees out of the region. GlobalX, an airline company based in Miami, FL, subcontracts with ICE to deport people every Friday from Gary/Chicago airport to Kansas City, MO before taking them out of the country. More than 19,000 people were deported out of Gary between 2013 and 2017 according to public records obtained through a Freedom of Information request by a local organizer.

Demonstrators were leaving the airport on foot Saturday morning when around two dozen Gary police officers descended on them. Officers grabbed and arrested two protestors who were in the process of complying with police instructions. A photojournalist was also seized and arrested by the officers while documenting the other arrests, in what amounts to a violent attack on the freedom of the press.

The march, held two days before Donald Trump takes power for a second time, represents the Gary community’s commitment to their immigrant neighbors in the face of state violence, but builds on the diligent work of community organizers over the years. Since 2017, interfaith groups, immigrant rights activists, and rank-and-file union workers from East Chicago and elsewhere in northwest Indiana regularly held prayer circles and other peaceful protests, but had not been met with significant repression.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

About thirty people attended a movie screening of Fell In Love with Fire, including many new faces. In the discussion following the film, many participants related their experience in the George Floyd Uprising to the uprising in Chile, reflecting on how to fight the new Trump regime. The evening concluded with writing letters to prisoners. People were very engaged and took a lot of zines and posters.

Oakland, California

About 150 people, mostly anarchists, marched to an abandoned OUSD [Oakland Unified School District] building, broke in, and held an assembly in a courtyard inside the premises. A dozen people spoke about various existing projects and how to get plugged in. Then, there were six breakout groups to discuss strategic horizons related to

Antirepression 2, International Solidarity
Housing
Immigration
Community resiliency/disaster relief, and
Other.

Afterwards, at 5 pm, a dance party got underway at the amphitheater at Lake Merritt, and people reconstructed the George Floyd memorial there.

Olympia, Washington

In Olympia, a coalition of local organizations and people from different political scenes organized a big-tent “People’s March.” The more anarchist contingent within the group advocated to attach a Festival of Resistance directly after the march. Dozens of organizations sponsored the events.

The event was diverse, well-attended, and notably intergenerational. The rally before the march drew about 1000 people. There were several speakers, including a speaker for Palestinian liberation, a recorded speech from local incarcerated pan-Africanist Tomas Afeworki, and a speaker and translator from La Resistencia, the group dedicated to shutting down the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center. There was also a moment of silence for a beloved long-term organizer, a participant in the organizing group behind the event, who passed away a week earlier. The march began with a local Indigenous activist performing a drum song; in the back, a marching band kept time.

Because of the ties between anarchists and other local activists, there was a lot of good faith participation. It appeared that the black bloc of about 20-30 people designed its splinter march with consideration for the family-friendly march, diverting police attention elsewhere. A little vandalism and graffiti occurred, to only a few people’s dismay; most in the march seemed unconcerned.

The march ended at the capitol, where people promoted a brand-new announcements-only Signal thread modeled on Austin’s Sunbird. A couple more speakers closed out the march.

The Festival of Resistance started immediately afterwards at a location only a few blocks away. The building was packed from the beginning. Probably 150-200 people circulated through it. This was the real aim of attaching the two events. Food and drinks were served. Several organizations set up tables—letters to prisoners, the Emma Goldman Youth and Homeless Outreach Project, zine distros, and the like—and people mingled and ate for an hour before the sessions. Then, there were announcements, a toast to our dearly departed, followed by two rounds of discussions and workshops. The workshops included direct action 101 (with a local history flipbook collecting printed communiqués), resisting repression, and the history and culture surrounding the local Artesian Well and the struggle against its enclosure. There were topic-based facilitated discussions, as well.

Many people expressed the desire to keep the ball rolling and repeat this model in order to try to continue the conversations rather than having to begin again from scratch. In retrospect, it would have been ideal to have already planned a future event that people could put in their calendars, or an activity that could facilitate people generating something like that together.

Providence, Rhode Island

Following the Providence Festival of Resistance and words from Tortuguita’s friends and comrades, some people marched to the Atwells Avenue overpass and hung a banner over I-95 reading “Revenge for Tortuguita—No More Presidents.”

Richmond, Virginia

Up to 500 people attended the Richmond Festival of Resistance in the course of the day. Many contributed names, remembrances, or tokens of other martyrs to the altar honoring Tortuguita.

In addition to celebrating grief together, Richmond’s “Festival of Resistance,” advertised locally as the inaugural “People’s Assembly,” included a full day of tabling, workshops, panels, and free food. The gathering launched a new initiative, the People’s Assembly, a recurring venue for citywide coordination and strategy building.

The idea is to hold citywide assemblies in each season, building from the neighborhood assemblies that many people left this gathering inspired to begin.

The altar to Tortuguita in Richmond, Virginia.

Tucson, Arizona

Less than a week in advance, a handful of friends decided to hold a humble “Parade of Resistance” on the Day of the Forest Defender. With only three days’ notice on a busy weekend, 30-40 people gathered in a park while members of a local brass band played a short set.

The parade then took a one and a half mile route through the part of town with the most pedestrian traffic. The sound system was bumping a cumbia mix made by a comrade who recently passed away. The vibe was fun and playful, and generally very well received by bystanders, some of whom joined in, dancing in the street for a block or two. The cops arrived about halfway through, but people ignored their orders to vacate the street, and they resigned themselves to redirecting traffic for us. Their investment in a “progressive” image often complicates their efforts to assert control.

The messaging was an experiment in vagueness. The only banner read “Towards a Free World”; it was accompanied by colorful butterfly puppets. A few paraders distributed pamphlets with accessible language calling for revolutionary action and transformation. On the back, a flier promoted an upcoming “Festival of Rebellion” on February 15.

The march ended at sunset at a classic spot for punks and train kids. Across the tracks, there was graffiti honoring Tortuguita and our dear friend who has just passed away. The dance party continued into the night with a bonfire and more graffiti.

Ultimately, it was a nice morale boost and very worthwhile, considering what a light lift the organizing was. It gave some of us a chance to get out in the streets without demanding a bunch of work from an already overloaded network. Definitely better than doing nothing. Hopefully, it created some momentum to carry forward.⁩

2024: Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire : The Year in Review

2025-01-01T01:04:18Z

It’s time to take stock of the year have just lived through and get oriented for the year ahead. Here, we review the events of 2024 and our own contributions to the fight for a better world.

A year that began amid genocide in Palestine and war in Ukraine and Sudan is concluding as Donald Trump prepares to return to power. This has grim implications in the United States, where Trump has explicitly promised to carry out “the largest mass deportations in US history,” but also elsewhere, as Trump may attempt to seize new territory, permit Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to resume invading Syria in order to carry out ethnic cleansing, and make deals with other fellow autocrats at everyone else’s expense.

From this vantage point, we can see that we have been living through the rise of a new reactionary nationalism that is now positioned to supplant neoliberalism as the dominant political paradigm. It has been gaining power almost everywhere—from Russia to Italy and Germany, from Brazil to Indonesia. It is clear now that the Biden era did not interrupt the rise of autocracy, but simply represented a stage of its rise, during which liberals demonstrated that they, too, were eager to militarize the police, fund genocide, and normalize extrajudicial violence—even if that meant preparing the way for an authoritarian regime that will do away with democracy as they knew it.

For decades now, we have been fighting on two fronts against neoliberalism and fascism. These are challenging conditions: winning a battle is no guarantee that we will not have to fight that battle again and again, and every time we lose a battle, we are forced to fight it once more, but on worse terms. That makes it all the more important that the ways that we fight demonstrate our values and reflect the sort of life we consider worth living.

As 2025 begins with an explosion in Las Vegas and an attack in New Orleans, it looks like we are in for a bloody period. As we have already seen in Trump’s aggrandizement of various murderers and, on the other side of the battle lines, in the support for Luigi Mangione, this era is shaping up to be a clash between different kinds of violence. It is not the future we would have chosen, but the story is not over and there may be better days yet to come.

This year, the challenge will be to fight as hard as we have to in order to defend ourselves and our communities while nourishing the parts of ourselves that are imaginative, that are tender, that can not only desire a better world but believe it into being. We will have to do these things in the midst of turmoil, rather than waiting for more peaceful times. We can do this.

Happy new year, dear comrades.

Footage from an anarchist demonstration outside a jail on New Year’s Eve, 2024.

Resisting the Police State

The militarization of the police continued throughout the Biden era, creating the conditions for Trump and his supporters to ratchet up state violence even further. Seeking to document the proliferation of “cop city” police militarization projects, we published an incomplete list of such projects around the country, along with a report from a protest against one of them in Lacey, Washington.

Not surprisingly, the rate at which police murder people has also continued to increase. When police in New York City attacked a person they accused of dodging the fare on the subway—opening fire, shooting the suspect, a police officer, and multiple other people who happened to be in the station—we reported on a collective fare strike action that people organized in response.

Finally, in a massive history and analysis, we explored the history of the Stop the Sweeps campaign in Austin, Texas, aiming to distill lessons about autonomous organization to aid revolutionaries elsewhere in future struggles against police violence and dispossession.

A picture is worth a thousand words: a burning “Cybertruck” marketed by fascist billionaire Elon Musk in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas.

Climate and Capitalism

The floods of May 2024 inflicted the most damage of any climate event in Brazilian history. Similar catastrophes occurred in Spain and elsewhere around the world. We circulated reports from anarchists who responded to these disasters, including anarchists in Appalachia who experienced Hurricane Helene.

Panning back to show these events in context, we published an article by Peter Gelderloos exploring why the strategies that mainstream environmental movements are employing to halt industrially-produced climate change are intended to fail.

Finally, we designed two posters—”Capitalism Is the Dance of Death” and “Capitalism Thrives on Death.” We mass-produced a sticker version of the former.

Solidarity with Palestine

Throughout 2024, the Israeli government continued its project of carrying out a genocide in Gaza to make way for its colonial ambitions. We have published several perspectives from people in the region making the case for an anti-colonial understanding of the situation and exploring what it means to act in solidarity with Palestinians.

When students at Columbia University and Barnard College set up an encampment in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide at the hands of the Israeli military, we immediately circulated coverage from within the movement, as well as a thorough history of the campus occupation movement of 2008-2010.

We did the same thing when students at Cal Poly Humboldt campus occupied a building in solidarity, precipitating a showdown with police from throughout the region that raised the bar for campus occupations with a bonk heard round the world, a bonk for the ages.

As the Gaza solidarity movement established campus occupations around the country, we documented them—from the University of Texas at Austin to the the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and as far away as Mexico City.

Speaking of Austin, we also published a guide to running an announcements-only Signal thread based on the experience of organizers in Austin.

In “Why the State Can’t Compromise with the Gaza Solidarity Movement,” we explored the strategic questions that emerged in the course of the occupations—questions that still face us today.

A banner seen at a Gaza solidarity encampment in Mexico City, featuring the titular character from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella, The Little Prince. The text reads “Until that which is essential becomes visible.”

On May 2, the editorial collective of the Wall Street Journal published a hit piece implying that our publishing project was behind the Gaza solidarity encampments across the United States. The New York Post followed suit the next day, copying the homework of their brighter and more industrious classmates.

Not much brighter, mind you.

To hear the Wall Street Journal tell it, you would think we were the ones pulling the strings behind the entire solidarity movement. But remember, Columbia University is a walled fortress. Security guards check the IDs of every single person who comes in and out. The only people who could initiate any kind of solidarity movement at Columbia were Columbia students and faculty, and that is exactly what happened.

We publish reports from participants in movements like the one that broke out at Columbia, but we are not the ones radicalizing them. The violence in Gaza started that process—and the police did the rest. Capitalist genocide enthusiasts have only themselves to blame for the pushback that they are experiencing.

We used to consider the Wall Street Journal to offer reliable journalism. Morally, of course, they were completely bankrupt—their whole project is to justify the tremendous disparities in wealth and power that capitalism produces. But if your raison d’être is to advise capitalists regarding their decisions in the market, you generally have to stick close to the facts, lest you give bad investment advice.

Not so anymore, apparently. This time, they intentionally misrepresented the situation, bending the truth in order to drum up outrage and fear according to the format set by Fox News and even worse outlets. And this was not some rogue columnist, but the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal itself. This represents the best they are capable of, the highest priorities of the paper and its owners.

Their coverage functioned as an offensive operation on the terrain of discourse, truth be damned, intended to discredit student protesters and make a target out of anarchists in general. The explicit death threats that the troglodytes who read their coverage sent us were an inevitable and presumably intentional consequence.

In any case, they will do nothing to discourage us from playing our part in resisting genocide. On the contrary.

Elsewhere in the Mideast

In response to simplistic readings of the situation in the Mideast, we published a statement by Iranian exiles arguing for a consistent opposition to the Iranian government as well as the Israeli government and all the other forces complicit in the genocide of Palestinians.

We also published a text about how Kurdish protesters in Turkey succeeded in preventing the autocratic Turkish government from annulling the municipal elections of March 31 in order to install its own representatives in positions of authority.

When the Syrian revolution finally got underway again, we presented perspectives from participants in the revolution in western Syria alongside a report from anarchists in Rojava, the northeastern region of Syria.

Finally, we published the reflections of a Russian anarchist volunteer in northeastern Syria. He described watching the Russian mercenaries exit the country after inflicting years of atrocities—hoping that one day, he might see the same soldiers lay down their arms in his homeland, too. Amid widespread suffering and peril, his anecdote represents a glimmer of hope. History cannot remain frozen forever—and all tyrants eventually fall.

The Return of the Far Right

In the background of all of these events, the buildup to the 2024 elections was like a ticking time bomb. For those who were paying attention, it was clear that the Republicans were likely to win. In a time when increasing disparities in political and economic power are driving many voters to seek a strongman to represent them, the Democrats doubled down on presenting themselves as the party of the status quo, permitting their own ossified bureaucracy to throw the election to their rivals. We identified this problem in July.

Yet some were still surprised on the night of November 5. The truth is, the Democrats are responsible in many ways for the problems we face today, and no half measures can avail us in this situation.

At the same time, the return of Trump will only intensify the crises we face. We immediately set out to mobilize in response, calling on people around the country to host assemblies and festivals of resistance in order to create the kind of connections that people will need to protect each other. As we see it, based on the experiences of the previous Trump era, resistance is our only hope to put a limit on how far this slide into authoritarianism can go.

Further Afield

Similar struggles are coming to a head all around the world, now.

For example, for several years, locals and environmentalists have fought against the Tesla “gigafactory” outside Berlin—the biggest factory producing electric cars for Tesla in all of Europe. In March, we published an interview with a participant in a forest occupation blocking the expansion of the factory, alongside a translation of a communiqué by a clandestine anarchist group that carried out an act of sabotage that shut down the Tesla factory for at least a week, costing the company hundreds of millions of euros.

As Elon Musk expresses his commitment to outright fascist politics more and more explicitly, forms of resistance are especially inspiring.

Our correspondent in Argentina sent us a report on the opening of the reign of Javier Milei, titled “Six Months in a Neoliberal Dystopia”—a vivid picture of the rival forces and visions contending for the future everywhere.

In August 2024, a wave of protests rocked Indonesia in response to political machinations aimed at anointing a successor to President Joko Widodo. We interviewed anarchist participants in different parts of Indonesia.

Elsewhere, in Georgia, a protest movement erupted against the government’s shift towards Putin’s authoritarian regime and the grip of foreign economic powers upon the Caucasus in general. We published a report from the streets and an analysis of the causes and stakes of the protests.

And More

We didn’t spend 2024 just reporting on social struggles and analyzing geopolitical conflicts. We also published more thoughtful, personal texts, such as this meditation on love for Valentine’s Day and this personal narrative from the front lines of the opioid epidemic.

For Steal Something from Work Day, we agitated in support of workers with sticky fingers, arguing that workplace theft should be understood as the most widely practiced form of wealth redistribution in our time:

The United States Department of Commerce estimates that every year, “businesses lose $50 billion as a result of employee theft.” Let’s zoom in on that word, “lose.” They aren’t saying that $50 billion just disappears; it isn’t simply mislaid, nor willfully destroyed. They mean that $50 billion ends up in the pockets of the workers, rather than in the bank accounts of corporate executives. In other words, the problem is that the money ends up in the hands of the people who are doing the work that produces it.

For April Fool’s Day, we published an extended rendering of the old CrimethInc. lightbulb joke. In a further ironic development, this text was earnestly translated into Spanish and Basque by a comrade in Basque Country who was not familiar with the concept of April Fool’s Day.

“How many anarchists does it take to change a light bulb?” I asked.

“We’re not here to change things for people,” said the insurrectionist. “The light bulb has to change itself.”

“‘Communism is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality has to adjust itself,’” quoted the communist. “It is ‘the real movement that abolishes the present state of things,’ which is to say, the darkness.”

“So if we change the light bulb, it was communism that did it?” objected the insurrectionist. “Talk about gaslighting.”

“Lenin says ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrocution of the whole country,’” the communist answered.

Film

This year, we completed our documentary about the 2019 uprising in Chile, “Fell in Love with Fire.”

Following up our earlier coverage of the Chilean uprising, this film offers an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt.

In addition, we published footage of a play that the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective performed at the Zapatista encuentro in January, supplementing accounts of the journey to the encuentro and the gathering itself.

We also produced a video walkthrough to accompany our guide, “How to Host a Haunted House.”

History

To celebrate the back-to-back birthdays of Louise Michel and Mikhail Bakunin, we published a narrative account of Michel’s exile in New Caledonia, followed by a virtual tour of Bakunin’s birthplace and family home, Priamukhino, including the museum documenting his life and the lives of his relatives and friends.

Revisiting queer resistance to the Nazis in search of tactics and inspiration for our own times, we published “Queer Wanderings through the Other Germany and the Anti-Nazi Underworld.”

To pass on the memory of more recent historical events, we published retrospectives on Reclaim the Streets, Occupy Wall Street, and the anarchist resistance to the fascist gathering in Charlottesville in 2017.

In order to enable our slain comrades to continue to address the living, we published the diary of Dmitry Petrov, in which he offered an eyewitness account of the revolution of 2014 in Ukraine. We also contributed an introduction for a book documenting the life and times of Aleksei Sutuga, a Siberian anti-fascist who passed away in 2020.

Obituaries

On February 6, 2024, the billionaire Sebastián Piñera perished in a helicopter crash. Considering how many Chilean radicals met their deaths from helicopters during the dictatorship, Piñera’s death hangs in history as an unsurpassable example of poetic justice.

At the end of February, we received an email from a person who signed himself Aaron Bushnell. He had written us to explain his reasons for setting himself on fire at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. In communication with his friends, we published their memories of him. He seems in all regards to have been an exemplary individual.

Aaron Bushnell.

Tragically, the anarchist Luciano Pitronello, also known as Tortuga, who had cheated death in 2011, passed away as the consequence of a workplace accident in August. We published a eulogy in his memory.

Speaking in Tongues

This year, we have published material in Arabic, Basque, Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese, among other languages. As of now, we have over 200 articles available on our site in Spanish and Italian, and over 100 in German, French, and Portuguese. For a full listing of all the material we have published in languages other than English, you can start here.

In addition, we work with people around the world to keep our works available in print in other languages and regions, as well. For example, this year, our comrades in Brazil did new print runs of three of our books in Portuguese: Recipes for Disaster, Expect Resistance, and Days of War, Nights of Love.

We take internationalism and the project of building bridges between different communities and struggles very seriously. It is an honor to work with and learn from our comrades all around the world. If we can build vibrant connections and circulate new ideas and tactics as they emerge, we may prove more resilient than the global capitalist order that has created so many challenges for itself as well as for us.

Stormy seas ahead.

Appendix: New Print Material

All of the following releases are available in our tools section. Please print and circulate them yourself!

Posters and Stickers

Click on the image to download the sticker.

Click on the image to download the poster.

Click on the image to download the poster. This is also available as a sticker.

Zines

Click on the image to download the zine.

Sacrificial Violence and Retribution

2024-12-23T15:05:21Z

In the following analysis, we explore the responses to two different extrajudicial killings as a way to understand the different forms of violence that are coming to the fore in our society right now. In the appendix, we offer an incomplete roundup of various responses to the shooting of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

Every day, something like fifty people are shot and killed in the United States. On December 4, 2024, one of them was Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, the most profitable health insurance corporation in the country. In the weeks since, we’ve all heard a great deal more about that particular CEO than about any of the hundreds of other people killed by gunfire this month. At the same time, there has been an outpouring of support for the attack, despite the efforts of media platforms and employers to suppress it.

On December 13, president-elect Donald Trump and vice-president-elect JD Vance invited Daniel Penny to join them at the Army/Navy football game—solely on account of his having senselessly murdered a Black person and been acquitted.¹ Here, we see some of the most powerful political figures in the world attempting to drum up enthusiasm for extrajudicial killings—provided that they target the marginalized.

We must understand the popular response to the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in the context of a society in which life is increasingly cheap. After the far right lionized George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse; after millions participated in a countrywide uprising demanding that police stop killing Black and brown people, only to see politicians across the political spectrum double down on supporting police, with the consequence that police have continued to murder people at a steadily accelerating pace; after bipartisan support for the genocide in Gaza; after hundreds of school shootings, hundreds of thousands of opioid overdoses, and millions of COVID-19 fatalities, not to mention the countless avoidable deaths resulting from the for-profit health and insurance industries—is it really so startling that one person took a shot at an executive? What is startling is that in nearly every other case, the killers have targeted those less powerful than themselves.

Trump’s decision to host Daniel Penny is a literalistic fulfillment of Frank Wilhoit’s dictum that “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” By contrast, the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO suggests that the law cannot always protect the in-groups from the out-groups.

But this is not just a question of violence aimed down the social hierarchy versus violence aimed up it. We are talking about two entirely different kinds of violence. Let’s call them sacrificial violence and retribution.

Sacrificial Violence

What is sacrificial violence?

According to René Girard, writing in Violence and the Sacred,

When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand.

Girard is part of a long tradition of European anthropologists whose speculations boil down to a series of just-so stories about humanity.² But we don’t have to buy into his entire framework to recognize what he is speaking about here:

The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.

Sacrificial violence, in short, is scapegoating carried through to the point of murder, functioning as a ritualized means of preserving a society in which there are tremendous unresolved internal tensions.

If left unappeased, violence will accumulate until it overflows its confines and floods the surrounding area. The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into “proper” channels.

And who makes for an ideal scapegoat?

All our sacrificial victims […] are invariably distinguishable from the nonsacrificeable beings by one essential characteristic: between these victims and the community a crucial social link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does not automatically entail an act of vengeance. The considerable importance this freedom from reprisal has for the sacrificial process makes us understand that sacrifice is primarily an act of violence without risk of vengeance.

This equation explains why ordinary bigots seek their targets among the most marginalized—those no one will avenge. But Girard’s framework goes further, showing how this can help to protect the state in times of crisis.

Perhaps this explains why Trump was able to win the 2024 election by promising to carry out gratuitous violence against undocumented people and trans people. Carrying out “the largest deportation operation in American history,” as Trump has explicitly pledged to do, will wreck the US economy. It will deliver no material gains to the vast majority of his supporters, who benefit from the underpaid labor of the undocumented and the resulting cheapness of commodities. From a purely economic perspective, exploiting the labor of the undocumented inside the borders of the United States provides more advantages to Trump’s supporters than deporting them ever could. By any measure, it’s a waste of resources: deporting a million people in one year will cost eighteen times more than the entire world spends annually on cancer research.

In other words, mass deportations are a costly luxury indulgence that Trump’s supporters regard as worth the expense because they experience the need for violence so intensely.

The same goes for the desire to see violence enacted—both judicially and extrajudicially—against trans people and against women as a whole. The mendacious propaganda falsely claiming that trans people are carrying out mass shootings or that undocumented immigrants are contributing to a crime wave is not received by its intended audience as cool-headed statistical inquiry, but rather as an indulgence of their desire to do violence to the truth itself as a step towards doing violence to those that they imagine can be harmed “without fear of reprisal.” They have not been misled by erroneous reporting; their desire for violence has created a market for falsehoods.

As we argued during the first Trump administration, Trump did not become popular by promising to redistribute wealth, but by promising to redistribute violence. This redistribution of violence creates a pressure valve for a whole host of resentments. To quote Girard, once more:

The desire to commit an act of violence on those near us cannot be suppressed without a conflict; we must divert that impulse, therefore, toward the sacrificial victim, the creature we can strike down without fear of reprisal, since he lacks a champion.

Why are societies driven to desire sacrificial violence in the first place? If it is true that sacrificial violence serves to channel rage away from those who provoke it, then we can infer that the more injustice there is in a society—the more that people are oppressed and exploited and humiliated by those who have more power and more privilege than they do—the stronger the urge for sacrificial violence will be.³

This brings us back to Trump’s decision to fête Daniel Penny. In a time when there is increasingly widespread anger, the role that sacrificial violence plays channeling violence away from those who are responsible for harm is essential for maintaining the stability of the prevailing order. This is the world of The Hunger Games, become real.

What would all these angry people be doing if their rage was not satiated via violence against those more vulnerable than themselves?

A banner seen hanging in Chicago over Lake Shore Drive on December 9, 2024.

Retribution

Retribution is fundamentally different from sacrificial violence. For its target, it seeks the person who is most responsible for a particular injustice, regardless of where that person is situated in the social hierarchy.

As a general rule, those who are most responsible for injustice are usually among those who possess the most power—otherwise, how would they have the opportunity to do so much harm? The average person in the United States has considerably more to fear from corporate executives than from undocumented immigrants.

It is the powerful who are able to pose the greatest threat to others: this is practically self-evident, despite the efforts of billionaire-owned media and social media platforms to humanize the wealthy and dehumanize the poor.

When we see people fixating their rage on the powerless amid the worst inequality in generations, this is a dead giveaway that they have been hoodwinked. It is telling that the populist movement around the wealthiest man to ever become president of the United States is presented as a “revolt against the elites” even as it rallies people to worship oligarchs like Trump and Elon Musk. There is no longer any way to rally people without at least pretending to have a go at some subset of the ruling class.

It is terrifying to realize that one’s enemies are considerably more powerful than oneself. It is much easier to take out one’s misfortunes on those who are even worse off. Easier—and utterly pointless—and despicably cowardly.

The shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare galvanized such a powerful response because it posed the question very clearly: should violence be enacted against the most vulnerable—or against the most responsible? It spoke to millions of people because, across the political spectrum, all of them understood that insurance profiteers are responsible for their suffering or for the suffering of people they empathize with. Precisely because it was legible as retribution, the shooting illuminated that injustice has been taking place on a mass scale.

Commenters on Youtube discussing their feelings about the shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

Girard cautions us against vengeance, arguing that a single act of retribution can set off a chain reaction:

Vengeance, then, is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body. There is the risk that the act of vengeance will initiate a chain reaction whose consequences will quickly prove fatal… The multiplication of reprisals instantaneously puts the very existence of a society in jeopardy.

It would put the very existence of this society in jeopardy, at least. Of course, a society in which capitalists are able to amass billions by ruthlessly exploiting everyone else—a society that can only remain stable by targeting more and more people for sacrificial violence—already involves a certain amount of jeopardy.

Indeed, what the capitalists fear most is that this single act of vengeance might come to involve the whole social body, that it could initiate a chain reaction. This is why Luigi Mangione, the person accused of shooting the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, is being charged with the same crime on both state and federal levels, and with terrorism besides.

Is Girard right about the risks of vengeance? We can grant that many people hold sincere but erroneous beliefs about who is responsible for their suffering, quite apart from the inclination towards sacrificial violence that the powerful seek to foster for their own protection. But is it better to inhabit a society in which the powerful can inflict any amount of death and suffering on the powerless without fear of consequences, up to and including outright genocide? Is that really the best way to protect society?

We can also grant that it is far better to resolve conflicts to the satisfaction of all parties than it is to descend into interminable blood feuds.⁴ But the state does not actually exist to resolve conflicts. The judicial apparatus and the hundreds of thousands of police who serve it exist to ensure that conflicts need not be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. They exist to force unsatisfactory outcomes on people, almost always to the advantage of the wealthy—thereby perpetuating the conditions that stoke the desire for sacrificial violence.

If Girard is indeed correct that sacrificial violence is always directed against those who can be “exposed to violence without fear of reprisal,” then it stands to reason that retribution is the only way to hold it at bay once it is unleashed.

Opposing retribution and accepting sacrificial violence in its place will not serve to avert bloodshed; it can only function to ensure that bloodletting will not threaten the social order. Today, the vast majority of us are closer to being among those who can be killed “without fear of reprisal” than we are to becoming executives whose deaths will be mourned on nationwide media—and the less we act in solidarity with each other, the truer that will be. If we do not wish to risk one day being subject to sacrificial violence ourselves, we must become capable of forging common cause with those who are worse off than us in order to defend ourselves from those who seek to exploit and oppress us.

In the absence of effective collective models for self-defense and social change, retribution hangs in the popular imagination as the only remaining way to take a stand against injustice. Sacrificial violence corrupts and debases all who derive relief from it; by contrast, retribution at least expresses a forlorn longing for a world without injustice. As Girard himself admits,

It is precisely because they detest violence that men make a duty of vengeance.

Beyond Martyrdom

In the iconography of sacrificial violence and retribution, the scapegoat and the martyr are twin archetypes. The former is sacrificed to stabilize the existing order, the latter serves to sanctify a new order by giving his life for it. By sacrificing himself, the martyr demonstrates that the new order has a transcendent value—that it is worth more than life itself. These archetypes are thousands of years old; their influence on us is deeper than we understand.

Of course, most people are only drawn to martyrdom as a spectator sport. Martyrs’ sacrifices often prove most useful to those who have no intention of risking their own lives for any cause. The popular response to the shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare shows how disillusioned millions of people are with capitalism and its beneficiaries, but this response is also a symptom of widespread despair and demobilization. The shooting aroused such an outpouring of pent-up frustrations precisely because these people have not been able to figure out what they themselves can do to put a stop to injustice and exploitation.

It is up to us to show that there are ways to resist injustice and exploitation that do not end in martyrdom. If we do not popularize collective models for bringing about social change, if we leave people to choose between passivity and martyrdom, the vast majority will choose passivity.

Those who approve of neither sacrificial violence nor retribution had better demonstrate an effective alternative. Arguing against retribution without doing anything to change the conditions that provoke it can only set the stage for even more sacrificial violence to occur in its place.

Make no mistake, as economic and ecological crises intensify, we are going to see more and more sacrificial violence—and more public figures will come to view it as necessary, even if they dare not call it by its name. Trump’s violent rhetoric is not a temporary excess; it is just the most visible manifestation of a mechanism that has already resumed the essential role that it plays in stabilizing the social order during every era of unrest.⁵

As anarchists, the spiritual economics of guilt and punishment that underlies the framework of retribution is foreign to us. Calculating culpability and meting out suffering is the work of the state, its judiciary, and its God; we have other ambitions. We do not wish to see the guilty punished as an end unto itself—we seek to do away with the means via which they oppress. We would pass up the fulfillment of any vendetta if we could thereby bring about the abolition of capitalism, even if that meant permitting every former billionaire to walk free. We don’t seek to goad others into becoming martyrs on our behalf. We aspire to model the sort of courage, humility, and care we hope that others will express alongside us so that together we can change the world.

But until we succeed, there will be sacrificial violence—and retribution.

Graffiti seen in Seattle, Washington.

Appendix

According to a survey, over 40% of young people polled deemed the assassination of Thompson “acceptable.” Photographs of graffiti, banner drops, and altered billboards expressing support for Luigi Mangione, the person currently being charged with the killing of the CEO, have gone viral and generated headlines. The December 4th Legal Committee is helping to run a fundraising campaign in support of Mangione’s legal defense; interviews with spokespersons Sam Beard and Jamie Peck have been featured on outlets such as CNN, drawing hundreds of supportive comments. As of this writing, the online fundraiser has raised over $186,000.

Here follows an incomplete roundup of graffiti, posters, corporate media interviews, and demonstrations addressing the shooting of Brian Thompson or expressing support for Luigi Mangione, the person accused of carrying it out.

Sam Beard speaking on CNN on behalf of a fundraising campaign in support of Luigi Mangione’s legal defense.

Pacific Northwest

A poster seen in Portland, Oregon.

Graffiti on a freeway in Medford, OR

California

A banner appeared in Turlock, California.
Two banners appeared on the bridge connecting San Francisco, California.
Graffiti seen in Riverside, California.
Billboard redecorated in Inland Empire, California.
Graffiti seen in Hollywood, California.
Graffiti seen in San Diego, California.

Freight train graffiti photographed in the Bay Area.

Southwest

Graffiti seen in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Graffiti seen in Tucson, Arizona.

Central

A stencil seen in Austin, Texas.
Also in Austin, on December 21, several people participated in a demonstration and circulated the following report:

Today, six Luigis took a couple banners to a highly trafficked foot bridge in downtown Austin and danced to the Mario theme song. Pedestrians cheered, wrote letters to Luigi, and even took photos with the banners. Letters ranged from heart-wrenching stories about family members being denied healthcare to love letters. The overall reception was extremely good. Flyers were handed out that called out the largest health insurance company in Texas, Blue Cross Blue Shield. They read:

“On December 4th, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down. The bullet casings told the story: this was act of vengeance against UnitedHealthCare, who denies over 30% of health insurance claims—a company emblematic of a system that kills. Every year, over 50,000 Americans die from lack of insurance. 38% percent of us avoid necessary care because we’re scared of the cost. One in twelve is drowning in medical debt. Health insurance companies aren’t doctors. They don’t heal—they profit by restricting access to care. While we ration medications, delay appointments, and worry about bills, they rake in billions. We get sicker and they get richer. This violence isn’t on the evening news. It’s buried beneath their marketing, their endless paperwork, their fine print. But make no mistake: this is violence. And they’re laughing all the way to the bank. Blue Cross Blue Shield, Texas’s largest insurer, denies one in five claims while pocketing $18 billion in revenue. Whether Thompson’s death filled you with joy or horror, it ripped the mask off. The truth was laid bare: these companies are complicit in widespread suffering. Think about the last time you or someone you love worried about a medical bill. Put off care because of the cost. Cut pills in half to make them last. You’ve felt the violence they inflict. Now, the media and government scramble to spin the narrative, calling working-class mother Briana Boston a “terrorist” for uttering “Deny, Defend, Depose” when her claims were denied. We must remain clear headed: a small group gets rich off our illness. The solution is just as simple: abolish these corporations and nationalize health insurance. Single-payer healthcare works everywhere else in the developed world, where people live longer and healthier lives. Texans, by contrast, die three years younger, victims of private healthcare. The only question left is this: When will we stop waiting and take what is ours?”

Austin, December 21.

Midwest

Graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois.
More graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois.
A banner displayed in Chicago, Illinois.
Graffiti seen in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois.

In addition, a rally in occurred Indianapolis, Indiana. From a report:

Today, we protest against Elevance Health not in its role as a distinct actor in the health insurance market, a single agent in the hall of mirrors of contemporary capitalism. Elevance operates in just the same manner as UHC in the way it ranks bodies and judges some to be worthy of care and the rest simply not worth the time or effort. In this manner, the only difference between the two is a matter of degrees in subdomains. We believe it is necessary to oppose this system of broad ranking of life expectancies in an age of depreciating life expectations. It is necessary as a precondition to a life worth living. We believe that everyone is worthy of care. We believe that everyone deserves access to a healthy life according to their own standards. Both Elevance and UHC stand as barriers to this possibility. This is why we oppose them.

Graffiti seen in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Southeast

Graffiti seen in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Graffiti seen in Richmond, Virginia.
A sticker seen in St. Petersburg, Florida.
A banner drop photographed in Atlanta, Georgia.

Northeast

Posters appeared in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Graffiti appearedin Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
A banner displayed Vermont.
Graffiti appeared in Baltimore, Maryland.
Several instances of graffiti appeared around New York City, as well as CEO “Wanted” posters. A noise demonstration also took place outside of the Ziegfeld Ballroom. One participant said,

“You know the theme of the event tonight is the roaring ’20s. In the roaring ’20s, there was a lot of wealth and inequality, just like now. So while they’re drinking champagne and thinking about glamor, we’re thinking about the people that we love who are poor, who are sick, and who can’t afford healthcare.”

Artwork in Santiago, Chile.

When they invited him to the football game, Penny had just appeared on Fox News describing the “guilt” he “would have felt if someone did get hurt”—making it explicitly clear that he did not consider Jordan Neely to count as a human being. ↩
For example, Girard argues that desire emerges imitatively and that this inevitably provokes violent tensions between people, as it causes them to compete for the same scarce objects. One might counter that while some of the things that people desire are indeed subject to scarcity, imitative desire could also give rise to cooperation, producing abundance in place of scarcity and diminishing the impetus towards violence, sacrificial or otherwise. In short, Girard does a compelling job of describing the role of sacrificial violence in afflicted societies, but he does not succeed in proving that it is inevitable. ↩
This explains why some of the new voters that Trump picked up in the 2024 election are immediately adjacent to the demographics he is pledging to attack: positioned near the margins, on the receiving end of injustice, they feel the urgency of violence more than most. ↩
There is a longstanding tradition, stretching back to Aeschylus’s Oresteia, of works of philosophy and literature claiming that state power and its attendant centralized judicial system were invented in order to put an end to the cycle of violence that Girard claims is the inevitable outcome of the pursuit of retribution. In the Icelandic tradition, the equivalent work is probably Njáls Saga, which recounts blood feuds and conflict resolution across a half century in the days before Iceland had a centralized government. Centralized state governance took hold in Iceland much later than in ancient Greece, however, so we can compare the myth presented in the Oresteia with the reality of Icelandic history. In fact, centralized government did not spontaneously emerge in Iceland as a means to resolve conflict; rather, once conflicts between various local parties became irresolvable, the king of Norway was able to take advantage of the opportunity to bring Iceland under his control and impose his rule upon it. If this example is any indication, the reality is precisely the opposite of the myth: those who cannot resolve conflicts among themselves will eventually be subordinated to the state, which is itself the result of unresolved conflict that has metastasized into a permanent condition, not the solution to unresolved conflict. ↩
In order to supply the American public with sacrificial violence, the previous generation of Republican politicians repeatedly invaded Iraq. That was a kinder, gentler time, when sacrificial victims were chiefly sought outside the borders of the United States. Just like today’s war on the undocumented, those invasions were justified with discernibly false pretenses and scaremongering. The result was sort of drunken spree from which politicians of both parties emerged with regrets, having completely destabilized the Middle East and made the world a considerably more dangerous place. ↩

News from the Front: The Reflections of a Russian Anarchist in Rojava : On the Collapse of Assad, the Future of Russia, and the Looming Turkish-Backed Invasion

2024-12-19T12:26:25Z

The toppling of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was many years overdue. Yet the tragedies in Syria are not over. Israel has bombed hundreds of locations around the country and seized a considerable amount of land in the southwest, while Turkish proxy forces are threatening to attack northeastern Syria in order to carry out ethnic cleansing. As in 2019, when Donald Trump gave Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the green light to invade the country, we call on people around the world to engage in solidarity actions to discourage the world powers from permitting this to happen.

To humanize at least one of the countless people whose lives hang in the balance here, we offer the reflections of a Russian anarchist volunteer in northeastern Syria who has participated in the revolutionary experiment in Rojava for many years. He describes watching the Russian mercenaries exit this country where they have inflicted so much harm, hoping that one day, he might see the same soldiers lay down their arms in his homeland, just as Assad’s mercenaries have.

For more updates on the situation in northern Syria from anarchist internationalists on the ground, you can follow this Russian-language telegram channel or consult the website of Tekoşîna Anarşîst.

I am composing these lines sitting on the cold and dusty floor, leaning against the wall. I really want to sleep. Over the past two weeks, I have lost all sense of what time it is—I have not often had the chance to be on the surface. Sleeping on a thin mattress in a common room is a routine I am used to. We often fall asleep at different times. Sleep is interrupted by people walking from room to room, information being transmitted by phone and radio, alarms being raised because of possible SNA¹ attacks on our position. To freeze under a swath of open sky, straining my ears over the beating of my own heart—can I hear Turkish drones in the sky? Are there artillery salvos, are there missiles flying?

And so I sit here, hugging my rifle and wrapping my face in a scarf. And the long hours of waiting drag on.

Of course, I think a lot about the situation that has rapidly unfolded in Syria. I can’t shake the feeling that we are on the brink of a major war. Yet here, the view of the quiet villages occupied by pro-Turkish fighters on the other side of the front line can be deceiving. Everything looks calm; the fields between us are empty; nothing moves.

In reality, this is the result of several years of war. The balance of precautions that has developed over this time: traps, mines, surveillance cameras and patrols on both sides—all of these narrow the possibilities for offensive action. Realizing this, I feel an invisible tension that stretches to the horizon in the direction of the enemy.

This situation is periodically shaken by the arrival of artillery shells and gunfire. The people at the other positions around us are in a similar situation. There is a city behind us, and pro-Turkish fighters can try to break through us straight to it. Everyone in our position is ready to defend against any attack.

In contrast to the daily reality on our part of the front, we are able to watch the news. Events are developing at breakneck speed. The Assad regime has fallen, Manbij is under attack by the SNA, Deir ez-Zor is in the hands of the SDF² to prevent the Islamic State from capturing the city—and now Shehba has been surrendered, Deir ez-Zor has been handed over to HTS,³ there is fierce fighting in Manbij and the subsequent retreat. Almost a million people have been forced to leave their homes due to new hostilities. Israel has been bombing military infrastructure throughout Syria. A lot of contradictory and incorrect information is circulating on various channels. It is clear that information warfare and psychological war are being waged. This is intended to influence people’s perceptions of the situation, to shape the discussions and the general mood as well as the coverage that other media outlets provide, not to mention its effects on the participants in the events themselves.

The news about the adoption of the green-white-black tricolor with three red stars as the flag of the new, post-Assad Syria occasioned special discussions among us. The Democratic Autonomous Administration of North-Eastern Syria considers itself part of this Syria. In view of the history of this flag, which became a symbol of the revolution in the country and the banner of the uprising against Assad in 2011, this move is not surprising.

There are also contradictions. HTS took this symbol into circulation. But it does not belong to them. Now an opportunity has opened up to make the project of democratic confederalism a possible option for all of Syria and beyond. Politically and in many other ways, Rojava is stronger and richer than HTS. The latter has just had a wave of success, while in Rojava, we have experience and a well-developed idea. The SDF would also prefer a political solution to the situation in Syria. SDF Commander-in-Chief Mazloum Abdi said that no one wants war here except for the pro-Turkish proxies.

Watching all this, some quick and perhaps naïve thoughts flash through my head. Footage from cities liberated from the regime shows people celebrating the fall of the regime. I have noticed that there are almost no women visible among them. This seems like a significant contrast to what many of the rallies and marches in Rojava look like.

The thought has also crossed my mind that it could become possible to see previously inaccessible places in Syria. After many years of dictatorship, traveling from Rojava to Damascus, for example, without “special routes” has seemed impossible. And what about the millions of people who were born and raised here? What about the Kurdish population, who for a long time were not even granted passports? What about those who were born after their parents were forced to emigrate from Syria? Or the generations who have known nothing but Assad’s rule and war?

These reflections bring me back to the situation in Russia. Witnessing the broad Syrian opposition, millions of people watching what is happening with hope, packing their bags to return home, it is difficult not to think: what will it be like when the same thing happens in Russia?

The Assad regime was guaranteed by Putin’s power; its fall has already completely changed the position of the Russian army here. Following the soldiers of Assad’s regime, who realized that they were no longer in danger from the old order and abandoned their equipment, weapons, and positions, the Russian army is also leaving. I watched with special feeling as the Russian columns passed by me at one of the positions. I peered into the faces of the soldiers, trying to understand whether they realized that all these years, they had been terrorizing the population with bombings, they had surrendered Afrin to the Turkish army, they had kept Assad’s regime alive—and now all this is over. Russian military aid to the Syrian dictatorship has ended. I do not think that those soldiers realized that they were looking into the eyes of a man from the same country as themselves, but who chose the other side of the barricades.

As will probably happen in Russia one day, the fall of the regime here has created a space that must be filled by a new political system. HTS, the former Al-Qaeda in Syria, which is doing its best to appear “presentable,” is unlikely to be able to organize a new state without a quick collapse or a new crisis. Although they overthrew Assad, HTS is not a liberation force in terms of its values. Perhaps in Russia, we will also see the regime collapse thanks to forces that are far from the values proclaimed by the Rojava experiment. Women’s liberation, the coexistence of various ethnic groups and other identities, each with their own autonomy, communes—today, in the Russian Federation, these are not especially popular topics, even in the opposition milieu.

Whatever the character of the force that overthrew Assad, it will stir up hope in the hearts of millions. It will also open the door for new ruling elites and their interests.

Hope and enthusiasm are in short supply in the fight against Putin’s regime today, but they are necessary for success. Sometimes, we will have to endure deep contradictions and disappointments.

In between my reflections, everyday affairs, and the organization of defense, our daily life is not without familiar things. An Arab comrade, who has been through almost all the fronts of the defense of the revolution, pours sugar into the teapot with full ladles, laughing and saying, “Dims” (Kurmanji for “syrup”). A cat named Myshka wanders among us, and we joke that she is part of the defense. A comrade next to me diligently writes Arabic script and shows her work to the Arab comrades, who patiently check her spelling.

Sunrise is coming. We are ready, the strong sweet tea is invigorating, and a new day is ahead. Events are moving very quickly—every couple of hours something new and unexpected happens. What awaits us today? I don’t know. But the thought that we are standing in defense of the revolution and its ideals together with people of all ethnicities and ages from around Rojava, that each and every one of us is making a contribution, gives me strength and clarity. I hope that Rojava’s survival will bring victories to our anarchist movement, which, in my opinion, can learn a lot here in Syria.

Syrian National Army, a proxy force serving the Turkish government. ↩
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the military of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. ↩
Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a coalition of Sunni Islamist insurgent groups from northern Syria. HTS evolved out of Jabhat al-Nusrah, which began as al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria. ↩

CrimethInc.

The Anti-Deportation Collective : Fighting the Machinery of Deportation in France in the 1990s

Gare de Lyon: Paris, May 5, 1998

The Anti-Deportation Collective

The 21:03 to Marseille

Too Much and Never Enough

Further Reading

Survival : A Story about Anarchists Enduring Mass Raids

Escape

Resources

Communications

Attack

Further Reading

“They Can’t Beat All of Us” : A Reportback from the Florida Abolitionist Gathering

An Uphill Battle

The Gathering

The Power of Inside/Outside Organizing: Julius’s Story

From Discussion to Action: Protest and Mutual Aid

Cop City Is Everywhere : Learning from the Movement to Defend the Forest

To Pick up Where We Left Off

The Day of the Forest Defender

The Stakes Keep Going Up

February 8: Coordinated Raids Across Southeast Atlanta

“Bless Them”

Trading Blows

From a Distance

Nationwide Summit against Cop City

Generations of Resistance

New Ambitions, Old Templates

From Scottsdale to New York City

Spring into Resistance

What Goes Up…

From Weelaunee to Gaza

No Confidence

Go Where They Go

Breaking and Exiting

Protest at GILEE

It’s Already Too Late

Rising Tension

The Presidential Debate

How Was the Movement Undermined?

How Did We Get Here?

Isolation

Urban Sprawl

“Spatial De-Concentration”

The Spiral of Repression

What If?

Infighting

Moving Ahead in a Cop Nation

Timeline: December 2023 to January 2025

Then They Came for the Palestinians : How to Respond to the Kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil

The Antisemitic Plan to Smear Palestine Solidarity as Antisemitic

What Will It Take?

Learning from Experience

We Are Made for Each Other

"The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon Musk" : A Bus Driver's Perspective on Elon Musk's Austerity Measures

“The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon Musk”

Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace

Tyranny Is the Opposite of Anarchism

A Three-Sided Conflict

No Law Will Give You Freedom

Remember How We Got Here

Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace

Further Reading

The Students Walk Out in Los Angeles : A Report from the Streets

Report from Los Angeles

Further Reading

Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE

Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE

Know Your Rights—Educate Your Community

Vet Information—Stop Rumors

Organize Rapid Response Networks

Organize Mutual Aid—Support Bail Funds

Fight Criminalization—Shut out the Police

Stand In Solidarity with ICE Detainees—Fight to Abolish ICE

Connect Communities

Build a Culture of Resistance against ICE and State Repression

For More Information

Know Your Rights:

The Day the Émigrés Struck Back : Remembering the General Strike of May Day 2006