D1. Anarchism

Report on successful blockade and tree-sit in so-called southern Oregon that stopped the logging of old-growth forest. For more background on the campaign, go here.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was pressured by activists to remove an area with ancient trees that was set to be logged as part of the Poor Windy project. This decision comes after three weeks of protest where community members prevented logging in the area by occupying a tree sit in an old growth ponderosa pine. The BLM and Boise Cascade caved to the demands of the activists and last night amended the contract for the Salmon Run timber sale to remove a contested new spur road which would have resulted in the logging of the old growth trees (find the amended contract here).

“When we fight, we win. Just a few weeks ago, saving these ancient trees seemed impossible,” said Salal Golden, one of the sitters occupying the tree. “While the forest that was saved by this decision is only a tiny fraction of the old growth slated to be logged by the BLM, this victory is a testament to the power of community members taking action into their own hands.”

Forest defenders have been camped on a platform over 100 feet high in an old growth Ponderosa Pine since April 1, protesting the agency’s intentional targeting of mature and old growth forest for logging – despite commitments from the agency and the Biden administration to stop logging old growth. The protest has not only opposed the Poor Windy project, but also shone a spotlight on the BLM’s efforts to log hundreds of thousands of acres of public forests across the state.

“Even as rural communities across Oregon experience the devastating impacts of the climate crisis and ceaseless harm from extractive industries, public agencies like the BLM continue to clearcut these invaluable forests which filter our air and water, protect us from out of control wildfire, and fight climate change,” said Rachel Stevens, a community activist supporting the tree sit. “While this fight might be over, we know there are so many more to win. Our community will not stand by as the last remaining old growth is destroyed.”

Yielding to pressure from the tree sit at Poor Windy, the decision by the BLM comes as the agency is increasingly under fire regarding its old growth and mature forest logging practices with protests and pending litigation on the majority of its active sales. In the face of this pressure, the agency unexpectedly cancelled the Baker’s Dozen project earlier this month, another contentious mature and old growth logging proposal in Southern Oregon. The Baker’s Dozen project targeted over one thousand acres for aggressive logging, with stands of trees over 300 years old.

The Biden Administration has committed to ending the practice of old growth logging on public lands, and the BLM just finalized a rulemaking to establish greater protections for intact ecosystems, yet countless projects targeting mature and old growth forests continue to be implemented across the region. Even after today’s win, the Poor Windy project includes plans to log more than 14,000 acres, including over 4,000 acres of mature and old-growth trees that are essential nesting, roosting and foraging habitat for the threatened northern spotted owl and many other species. While the agency agreed to drop one area of old growth in the face of ongoing protests, more remains on the chopping block.

“The single largest threat to the remaining mature and old-growth forests on public land in Oregon are the agencies that are supposed to be protecting them, and the corporations eager to turn them into private profits,” says Sam Shields, a community organizer supporting the tree sit. “This tree sit has exposed the inexcusable malpractice of the BLM and demonstrated the power of community organizing. Direct action is the last line of defense for these priceless forests and we will continue to put our bodies on the line until they are all protected and the societal structures supporting their destruction are dismantled.”

On April 17th, students at Columbia university in New York launched an encampment calling for the private, ivy league university to divest from the state of Israel, taking inspiration from past divestment struggles on campus against the Vietnam war and apartheid in South Africa. The encampment is only the latest in a series of growing campus protests which have denounced the US backed occupation of Palestine and the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide within Gaza. On April 18th, the NYPD moved in and arrested over 100 students and attempted to breakup the encampment, however hundreds of reinforcements reformed the occupation and continued the protest as authorities attempted to lock-down the university, controlling who came in and out. In response to the arrests by police, solidarity encampments, walkouts, and demonstrations began spreading across the United States and beyond.

On April 22nd, hundreds of faculty at Columbia walked out of class in support of the students and to denounce the recent mass arrests. Across the US, police on other campuses also attempted to crush the growing wave of encampments, making arrests at other universities, but having little impact as the demonstrations continued to grow in size. In New York City, police swarmed outside of Columbia and NYU, making arrests and attempting to hold the streets, as more schools launched encampments and a physical building at the New School was occupied. In California, an administrative building was also occupied and barricaded in Arcata at Humboldt State, part of the public California State University system, as the demonstrations spilled outside of the ivy league and onto the west coast, with UC Berkeley soon following suit. Police violently attacked students in Arcata, but failed to stop the occupation, as more students joined the struggle in the face of escalating police brutality.

Current struggle on campus pushing for divestment from Israel are inspired by past movements, such as the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Source: MIT Coalition Against Apartheid, @mit_caa

The spreading of the occupations comes after months of attempts by university officials to attack and squash the growing wave of Palestinian solidarity activism on campus, which has demanded that university officials divest from Israel and the US military. Anti-Zionist Jewish led organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace have been suspended from campuses like Columbia for reportedly “failing to ask for permission well before protesting,” while Students for Justice in Palestine has been banned not only at Columbia, but across the entire state of Florida. Some students have even faced “criminal charges, expulsions, [and] suspensions” while pro-Israel demonstrators have physically attacked pro-Palestinian protesters and in Vermont, Palestinian students were shot in what many believe to be a racist attack. Most recently, the University of Southern California cancelled the commencement speech of valedictorian Asna Tabassum over recent social media posts in support of Palestine, leading to mass demonstrations. So much, as they say, for free speech.

In the face of escalating campus protests, president Biden and many politicians have rushed to brand the demonstrations as “anti-Semitic,” conflating political opposition to Israeli apartheid with racism and hatred of Jews. Republicans such as “senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley called on Biden to send the National Guard to quash the protests” as the mainstream media becomes inundated with reactionary voices calling for “anti-Semitic rioters” to be punished and “pro-Hamas anarchists” to be arrested. Leading Democrats such as Senator John Fetterman have even breathlessly compared pro-Palestinian demonstrators to the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, while New York Mayor Eric Adams said he was “disgusted with the antisemitism being spewed at and around the Columbia University campus.” Government hearings have also been held on reported “antisemitism on campuses,” supposedly emanating from the demonstrations in support of Palestine, despite the fact that anti-Zionist Jews have played a central role in the demonstrations.

Ironically, these same forces have been largely silent as Alt-Right and neo-Nazi groups have littered college campuses across the US with posters, flyers, and stickers for the past eight years, as white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and Milo Yiannopoulos have been allowed to speak with complete police and campus protection. In Arizona, the ASU campus even recently shelled out over $10,000 for security to protect the white supremacist speaker Jared Taylor, who was invited to speak by a group of college Republicans aligned with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Ironically the same university has banned several pro-Palestinian speakers from speaking on campus.

Meanwhile, Republican bureaucrats such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, Paul Gosar, Steve King, Idaho Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin, and beyond have all established direct connections to neo-Nazi activists and many have even appeared alongside Nick Fuentes at white supremacist gatherings. Just this week, Paul Gosar’s campaign was found to be “engaging a North Carolina firm whose owner proudly promotes white nationalism and antisemitic tropes, while pushing false narratives surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.” Far-Right billionaire Elon Musk has trafficked in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, pro-Trump groups like Turning Point USA have pushed conspiracy theories such as the “Great Replacement,” which promotes anti-Semitic tropes, and Trump has had direct associations with leading anti-Semites such as Nick Fuentes and Kayne West.

Anti-Semitism is rising – but it’s coming from the far-Right, ailed directly with the Republican party. Those fighting on campuses across the US, many of them anti-Zionist Jews, are not “anti-Semitic” for opposing the state of Israel; they are taking part in a long history of resistance to racial apartheid and the US war machine. By using anti-Semitism as a bludgeon against growing resistance to the ongoing war and genocide in Gaza, elites are hoping throw a wet blanket onto the movement as public opinion against the war continues to turn.

Graffiti on building at Humboldt State in Arcata, CA. Source: crimethinc.com

Democrat and Republican officials are also terrified that the student occupations and demonstrations will spill out of the university and become a full blown revolt, not just against the war, but against growing anger over inflation and the rising cost of living in the face of increasing wealth inequality. Just as police, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration mobilized to clampdown and stomp out the Occupy encampments, police across the country are now being marshaled to attack and dismantle the campus occupations as quickly as possible.

Will this repression be met with solidarity and bring more people into the movement? Will the struggle spill out of the campuses and across the social terrain? The spreading of the occupations to public and state schools is one indication of where things might go, and the solidarity shown in the streets by faculty, community members, and workers against the police raids is another.

What follows is our roundup of the current wave of student occupations and encampments across the US.

Pacific

Student with injury from police at Humboldt State (top right), riot police outside of Siemens Hall (bottom right), barricades in front of building (left).

Humboldt State, Arcata, CA

Students at Humboldt State, a part of the public California State University system, occupied Siemens Hall, an administration building. According to a post from Humboldt for Palestine:

Cal Poly Humboldt students have taken Siemens Hall in solidarity with students across the nation occupying campuses for Palestine. Their demands as we understand them are as follows:
1. For CPH to disclose all holdings and collaborations with the zionist entity.
2. Academic Boycott, cut all ties with israeli universities.
3. Divest from all ties to the zionist entity including companies complicit in the occupation of Palestine.
4. To drop all charges and attacks on student organizers.
5. An immediate ceasefire and end to the occupation of Palestine. Students are requesting support as follows: Bodies to join them in the occupation of Siemens hall.

Riot police attempted to evict the occupied administration building, but were held back by students who defended the barricades and were reinforced by supporters outside. A report on social media stated that on Monday night, police were “instructed to stand down and have withdrawn from Siemens Hall.” A post on social media on April 23rd wrote:

Calling on all students and community members! The occupation by Cal Poly Humboldt students is still ongoing and they need your support. Yesterday they and those showing up to be witnesses were met with violence by UPD and APD. This is a peaceful protest and the students would like it to stay that way. Our collective community power demanded the police to leave and they did. Let’s continue to show up to protect these students as they demand that Cal Poly Humboldt divest from “israeli” occupation and the ongoing genocide. Go to the campus as soon as you can!

A report posted to CrimethInc. wrote:

Within an hour, campus police attempted to negotiate with the occupiers, who stood strong and refused to exit the building. Soon after, police from every department in the county showed up—including a helicopter, K-9 units, and off-duty police. Students responded by swarming them.

The cops’ initial plan to carry out a mass arrest was thwarted by a series of clashes both inside and outside the building. The occupiers beat back police advances, despite facing brutality unlike anything we have seen over the last decade of struggle in Humboldt County. It is important to note that the police used both batons and shields as weapons to brutalize protesters; in the hands of police, any tool is a weapon.

Police arrested two people and dragged them out of the building by their hair; they inflicted multiple cranial lacerations on another person, necessitating a trip to the hospital and several staples. Many more people were left with head injuries and at least one with a concussion.

During the clashes, police drove a university truck into the crowd, pushing protestors toward the riot line. Yet despite this brutality, it became increasingly apparent that the police were completely unprepared to face down the ferocity and intelligence of the student occupiers. The police were physically repelled from Siemens Hall and massive barricades were erected out of objects from within the building including chairs, desks, trash cans, and doors that had been removed from their hinges.

The police surrounded the occupied building, and a large crowd of students, faculty, and other community members surrounded them, chanting “De-escalate by leaving!” and “People power! We are stronger!” among other chants.

After a six-hour standoff, the police packed up and went home. Hundreds of students rushed into the building and joyously embraced occupiers. The police-imposed division collapsed and we achieved the upper hand. The university has declared a three day lock down. For us, this is only the beginning.

For ongoing updates, see Humboldt for Palestine.

Encampment at Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley.

UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

Students at UC Berkeley held a rally in solidarity with Columbia students and against the occupation of Palestine on April 22nd and began erecting tents at Sproul Plaza at the main entrance of the campus.

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

On April 24th, students launch an encampment at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.

Southwest

Encampment springs up at the University of New Mexico.

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM

Protests were organized on Monday, April 22nd and an encampment was held that night. Organizers report on social media, “Police stormed the camp last night and tore down our tents BUT WE’RE STILL HERE! Join Us at the Duckpond! WE NEED YOU.” Follow UMN Palestine Solidarity Camp for more updates.

Midwest

Banner reads, “Liberated Zone” at University of Michigan.

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

University of Michigan Students launched an encampment “on the Diag on the UM campus in Ann Arbor!” For updates, go here.

Encampment kicks off at University of Minnesota. Via @UMNSDS

University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN

An encampment was erected in the early morning of April 23rd, with nine people reportedly being arrested on the campus hours later. The local Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter reported that the encampment was quickly issued a dispersal order. A massive walkout was then organized to denounce the police repression of the movement. Follow UMN SDS for more updates.

Southeast

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

Students organize a rally in solidarity with repression at Columbia university on Friday, April 19th which grows into a protest encampment.

University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC

Encampment in Charlotte at the University of North Carolina begins on April 22nd. Follow updates here.

Washington University, St. Louis, MO

Solidarity rally at Washington University in St. Louis, MO grows into encampment. On April 21st, university officials call in police to clear it. For more updates, go here.

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN

On March 26th, students clashed with police after attempting to enter building and have been holding demonstrations on campus since. According to Yahoo News, “Vanderbilt University’s encampment has been the longest-running. It began more than three weeks ago, alongside a sit-in by the entrance of the chancellor’s office in one of the main administrative buildings.”

Northeast

Tufts University, Cambridge, MA

Encampment launched at Tufts University in Cambridge, MA. For more updates, go here.

MIT, Cambridge, MA

Students at MIT in Cambridge launch the “Scientists Against Apartheid” encampment. For updates, go here.

Tent at encampment at Emerson University. Sign reads, “Self-Loving Jew for Palestine.” Via @EmmaYourFriend

Emerson, Boston, MA

Encampment launched at Emerson college in Boston, MA. For updates, go here.

Yale students rally after dozens of arrests. Via @occupyyale

Yale, New Haven, Connecticut

On April 19th, a large solidarity encampment of hundreds springs up at Yale University in New Have, CT, in solidarity with students at Columbia and to demand that Yale divest from Israel. On April 22nd, according to Occupy Yale on Instagram:

With no warning of when they would come, police ambushed us at 6:40 am while students at the encampment were sleeping. They blocked off entrances to the plaza and arrested 49 students. Yale, you have intimidated us, criminalized us, militarized our campus, and failed to accept our demands. We will not stop, we will not rest until we have disclosure and divestment.

Following the raids, hundreds rallied against the arrests. Follow updates here.

University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA

On Tuesday, April 23rd, a protest in solidarity with Columbia kicks off start of encampment. For updates, go here.

University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Encampment begins at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD. For updates, go here.

Encampment at Columbia university continue to grow in New York. Via @simonerzim

Columbia University, New York

On April 17th, a protest encampment springs up at Columbia University in New York calling for the university to divest from the state of Israel. Under pressure to clamp down on growing dissent against the US backed war and genocide in Gaza, the university sends in the NYPD who arrests over 100 students. This repression inspires others take action, as thousands launch walkouts, protests, and encampments at a variety of other universities. Back at Columbia, hundreds rally against the raids and the encampment is re-launched, as police attempt to control access in and out of the school.

On Monday, April 22nd, faculty organize a walkout and protest rally to denounce the police raids and attacks on the movement by the university. As the encampments spread, the political and pundit class rush to label the demonstrations as ‘anti-Semitic,’ as thousands join the movement in protest against the violent attacks by law enforcement. Columbia also announces that it will move to online classes to finish out the semester as the encampment continues.

Hundreds block NYPD arrest vans in New York following the arrest of students at New York University (NYU). Via @palyouthmvmt

New York University (NYU), New York

On April 22nd, hundreds of students at New York University launched their own encampment in Gould Plaza in solidarity with those at Columbia. Police quickly moved to barricade the area and make 128 arrests of demonstrators, which was followed by hundreds blocking the NYPD jail buses and later rallying in support of those arrested outside of the jail.

On April 23rd, hundreds more rallied in Washington Square Park in support of the movement and to denounce the police repression of students at NYU the night before.

Students hold campus building at the New School in New York. Via @AshAgony

New School, New York City

Starting on April 21st, an encampment begins at the New School in New York City. Students have occupied one of the buildings on campus while pickets in support of the occupation taking place outside.

University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

On April 23rd, an encampment is set up at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY.

This roundup will be updated as more information becomes available. Follow us on Mastodon for future updates.

Via @DivestBrown

Brown University, Providence, RI

On April 24th, encampment established at Brown University in Providence, RI.

Via @GoodVibePolitik

Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA

On April 24th, encampment established at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA.

Harvard College, Cambridge, MA

On April 24th, rally held and encampment established at on the Harvard Yard in Cambridge, MA.

Report from so-called Eugene on the recent April 15th blockade in solidarity with occupied Palestine. Check out a roundup of April 15th actions here.

Amidst a genocide in occupied Palestine, Eugene, OR joined the people of the world to make their demand clear: we want a free Palestine. Despite months of protesting, contacting officials, and boycotting, the governments of the Western world unsurprisingly refuse to listen to the voices of their people and instead continue to enable the violence that facilitates their imperialistic stronghold in the Middle East. On Monday, April 15th, advocates for Palestinian liberation from around the globe participated in economic blockades to shut it down for Palestine

Locals in Eugene, Oregon and surrounding areas participated in this effort, allowing the call for liberation to stretch from Palestine to Oregon. Standing arm in arm on the I-5, over 60 people stopped traffic to halt the flow of commerce. They chanted, sang, and held signs that proclaimed their alignment with a free Palestine and opposition to the global imperialist regimes that instigate oppressive violence against the people of the world.

In response to this action, 6 state agencies (EPD, OPD, SPD, Lane County Sheriffs, and the SWAT team included) showed up with over 127 officers equipped in riot gear and with chemical weapons. While protesters stood in the road, even sitting cross-legged for some time, officers responded by mass arresting everyone present, even those who attempted to comply with their demands and leave the freeway.

Why does a group of people walking onto a road necessitate such a massive response? The answer is glaring, permeating, and insidious. It lives at the forefront of the mind of every person that has ever found themselves at odds with the US regime, and is buried deep inside the hearts of those who survive by assimilation or domination inside it.

We know.

The State will do anything, sacrifice anyone, to maintain control, and dominate people who demand, by their actions or very existence, an end to white supremacist, colonial rule.

62 arrests were made and the protesters were kept overnight, some for over 30 hours, for this call to end a genocide that has already martyred over 30,000 Palestinians.

Every protester that was arrested has been charged with disorderly conduct in the second degree, further underscoring the desperation of the State to maintain control.

The United States continues to send billions of tax-payer dollars to the Israeli occupation forces for their brutal assault against the indigenous Palestinians; a violence that echos that of the country’s own treatment of the indigenous people of Turtle Island.

While the State remains strong in its support of violence, the people remain strong in their support of liberation. The goal of this global solidarity effort was to shut down the economy that funds the ongoing occupation and genocide in Palestine.

The call for a free Palestine is a call to end the global imperialistic regime that uses violence and repression to control the people, and subsequently their resources. From the bombed and blood-stained streets of Palestine to the swept and surveilled streets of Eugene, an imperialistic state will always use the threat and execution of violence to force complicity in their crimes.

Eugene was not the only city to see this increase in state repression and violence. On the same day, mass arrests were made against protesters at Columbia University; in Philadelphia, Connecticut, and New York; and across the country. The Eugene Police, the New York Police, and the Israeli occupation forces are all arms of the same imperialistic war machine committing genocide and oppressing the very citizens they claim to protect and serve.

Free Them All: Oregon to Palestine Prisoner Solidarity

⁨Palestine is not unique but perhaps exemplary among struggles for liberation. The prisoner movement holds the immediate goal of a united field of struggle, whether clandestine armed struggle or popular mass movement. Situated in the belly of the beast, we in the US recognize the carceral nature of settler-colonial occupation and imperialist state repression, and elevate the crucial call for freedom to all Palestinian prisoners. The importance of this call and this goal cannot be overstated. Imprisonment in occupied Palestine is ubiquitous, affecting everyone: roughly 20% of Palestinians have been imprisoned by the Zionist occupiers and every Palestinian family has a loved one or knows a loved one who has been imprisoned by the occupiers. The object of incarceration is likewise collective, affecting every form of political, social, or community commitment as a way of collectively punishing an entire population for resistance against occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and using imprisonment to actively further these genocidal aims.

We have all seen the numbers: over 9,500 Palestinians imprisoned since October 7th, including 275 women, 520 children, 66 journalists, and 5,168 orders of administrative detention without charges or trial, and at least 16 Palestinian prisoners tortured to death. Among these are leaders of the Palestinian prisoner movement, and the number of Gazan detainees who are held in military camps and forcibly disappeared is unknown. We have all seen the images of Gazan prisoners run over by tanks alive with their hands cuffed behind their back. We have all seen the images of hundreds of Gazan prisoners stripped naked and cuffed before field executions, including in the yards of besieged and destroyed hospitals.

We who struggle in the belly of the beast for the liberation of Palestine and an end to imperialism, see the aims of imprisonment in occupied Palestine as collective punishment for resistance and as a tool of occupation and displacement. We see those same aims here, too, where members of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army are being killed by the small tortures of prison accumulated over a lifetime. We see those same aims here, too, where where Leonard Peltier is still not free, where Mumia Abu-Jamal is still not free. We see those same aims here, too, where where dozens of our friends and comrades are locked up for standing up against anti-Blackness and the police state during the George Floyd Uprisings. We see those same aims here, too, where where the Zionist-collaborating terrorist police in Georgia are still imprisoning our friends and comrades for fighting for their lives against Cop City.

Lastly, we know that despite the universality of imprisonment as a weapon of warfare and occupation, it is also –– since wherever there is repression there is rebellion –– a school of resistance, even amidst the most severe forms of brutality and technology of death. In occupied Palestine –– like in the H-Blocks in occupied Ireland, the F-type prisons in Turkey, and everywhere from Attica to San Quentin, from Guantánamo to Pelican Bay –– prisons are a place of political and militant development and training, where all of the resistance is represented following and in turn leading the outside struggles for liberation.

Our 24-32 hours in jail are nothing in compared to what political prisoners all around the prison world experience, but for those of us for whom this was the first experience in a cage, we re-affirm our commitment to the struggle for freedom for Palestinian prisoners and prisoners everywhere, against the police and prisons, against the occupation, against American imperialism, against capitalism, for a better world the slight chance for which we will not fail to seize.⁩

The people of Eugene unite with the people of the world in this clear demand: We want Palestine to live, and we want Palestine to be free. 

photo: Stop the Sweeps Eugene

Action report from Appalachians Against Pipelines about recent lock down in West Virginia against the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Early Saturday morning, a pipeline fighter using the name Vole locked herself to an excavator on the West Virginia side of Peters Mountain in the Jefferson National Forest, preventing Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) from finishing construction on both sides of the mountain, next to the Appalachian Trail. Banners at the site of the action read, “DESTROY ALL PIPELINES” and “LAND BACK,” and a rally of supporters gathered nearby in the National Forest.

After blockading pipeline work for 5 hours, Vole was extracted from her blockade and escorted off the mountain by law enforcement. She was charged with 3 misdemeanors, had bail set at $2,000, and has since been bailed out of jail.

“What happens in this region and on this mountain matters,” explained Vole before taking action today. “It matters to the trees MVP has ripped from the earth, to the critters who took shelter here, and to topsoil destroyed for generations. It matters to the people near and far who have loved and fought for this place, and those who have watched MVP destroy it further with each passing day. It matters for the thousands of people who will walk along the Appalachian Trail with explosive gas running below their feet if this pipeline is finished. It matters to me enough to stop them up here for as long as I can.”

The site of Vole’s action is the same site where two tree sits prevented MVP from clearing trees on the pipeline easement for 95 days in 2018. Recently, MVP bored through Peters Mountain, under the Appalachian Trail (AT). Vole’s protest this morning prevented the company from connecting the pipe running under the AT to that running down the mountain.

“People and systems in power have sacrificed this strip of Appalachia for corporate greed,” continued Vole. “Just as they sacrificed its mountaintops for coal, its healthy air and water for profit, and its people to an opioid epidemic and an ever growing jail population. Yet, for just as long as this area has been made a sacrifice zone, people here have been fighting extraction and all the pain and evil it brings- against colonizers, coal barons, and countless corporations. The breadth of struggle in these ancient hills is vast. It began long before the MVP was ever an idea, and will continue beyond this pipeline, well into the future.”

The Mountain Valley Pipeline is over budget by more than $4 billion and nearly 6 years behind schedule. The pipeline, if completed, would transport fracked gas across at least 303 miles of Appalachia. The project has a long record of environmental violations, and MVP’s permits (particularly those to cross the National Forest and waterways) have been revoked numerous times. In June 2023, the pipeline was fast-tracked by Congress, despite local residents voicing their opposition and concerns. Over the last few months, Mountain Valley Pipeline has escalated its legal intimidation of pipeline fighters, filing multiple Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP suits) and collaborating with local law enforcement to charge protesters with erroneous felonies in order to discourage resistance. The legal intimidation has failed to stop protestors.

Full Statement from Vole:

“Six years ago, right around where I am today, people lived in two small treesits to protect a thriving forest atop this mountain for 95 days. Now, because of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, that rich ecosystem is a disaster zone. MVP has cleared trees, buried pipe in the national forest, and drilled through the mountain under the Appalachian Trail. The corporation aims to turn so-called Peters Mountain, and 300 miles more, into a dangerous money-making scheme. We can’t just stand by and let them do this.

“What happens in this region and on this mountain matters. It matters to the trees MVP has ripped from the earth, to the critters who took shelter here, and to topsoil destroyed for generations. It matters to the people near and far who have loved and fought for this place, and those who have watched MVP destroy it further with each passing day. It matters for the thousands of people who will walk along the Appalachian Trail with explosive gas running below their feet if this pipeline is finished. It matters to me enough to stop them up here for as long as I can.

“Backed by hundreds of years of colonization, the weight of the “justice system,” and some of the most powerful people in the world, MVP is struggling to complete their pipeline at all costs. People and systems in power have sacrificed this strip of Appalachia for corporate greed, just as they sacrificed its mountaintops for coal, its healthy air and water for profit, and its people to an opioid epidemic and an ever growing jail population.

“Yet, for just as long as this area has been made a sacrifice zone, people here have been fighting extraction and all the pain and evil it brings- against colonizers, coal barons, and countless corporations. The breadth of struggle in these ancient hills is vast. It began long before the MVP was ever an idea, and will continue beyond this pipeline, well into the future. Just as the fight to end all extraction and for Land Back stretches between mountain ranges and across oceans.

“From Appalachia to Gaza no one is free until all are free.”

Welcome, to This Is America, April 18th, 2024.

In this episode, first we present an interview with a member of Houston Food Not Bombs, who speaks about how the group has been pushing back on attempts by the city to shut down their mutual aid program through ongoing ticketing and police harassment.

We then turn towards New York City, and discuss how Democrats have greased the wheels through fear campaigns over crime and migrants, to bring in the National Guard onto the city’s subway system.

Via @slam.matu

We then speak to members of the Montreal Autonomous Tenants’ Union, who discuss their organizing efforts and fighting back against landlords, rising rents, and gentrification. Note, this interview is quite old, be sure to check out and follow the group on Instagram here for current updates.

Finally, we discuss the unfolding legal circus around Trump and why we shouldn’t be surprised when rich and powerful people – don’t go to jail.

But first, here’s some upcoming events!

Upcoming Events

• April 19th – 21st: Chicago Anarchist Skillshare. More info here.
• April 20th: Free Em All Ball. Benefit for political prisoners. Huntington Park, CA. More info here.
• April 26th – 29th: Northeast Bash Back Convergence. Philly, PA. More info here.
• April 27th: Rattling the Cages: Political Prisoners, Mass Incarceration and Abolition. Virtual event. More info here.
• May 4th: First Ever Kitsap Anarchist Bookfair. Bremerton, WA. More info here.
• May 4th: First Annual Upstate Anarchist Bookfair, Binghamton, NY. More info here.
• May 18th: Free Tall Can. Benefit for antifascist political prisoners. San Bernadino, CA. More info here.
• May 23rd – 29th: Lost Sierra Action Camp. Plumas National Forest, California. More info here.
• May 24th – 26th: Constellation: An Anarchist Festival in Montreal. More info here.
• June 28th – 30th: Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair. Asheville, NC. More info here.
• July 2nd – 9th: Hudson Valley, Earth First! Gathering. More info here.
• July 12th – 14th: Dual Power Gathering. Pacific Northwest. More info here.
• November 26th – 28th: Indigenous anarchist convergence. Occupied so-called Phoenix, AZ. More info here.

Report from Carbondale, Illinois on recent march and demonstration during the eclipse.

On August 21dy, 2017 a total solar eclipse crossed across the continent of North America with the peak of its totality in Makanda, IL 15 mins south of Carbondale, IL. On April 8th, 2024 another total solar eclipse crossed through southern Illinois with the paths of both eclipses intersecting right in Makanda, IL. On the eve of the first eclipse a joyous march happened in Carbondale with a banner that read, “This Empire too will be Eclipsed.” After the first eclipse a small group of earthlings took on a very serious mission to build autonomy between the Eclipses right in Southern Illinois. To not see the eclipses as the dumb movements of balls of rock and gas, but a deep invitation to build and fight for their dying region. This vision can be read more in depth here. But after seven long years The Next Eclipse did in fact come.

On April 7th, 2024 on the eve of the Next Eclipse a hundred or so marched out of the punk neighborhood in Carbondale, IL and took the strip. As they marched they banged on drums, played guitars, and made joyous music over chants of “We are the Next Eclipse”, “The End of the World; the Beginning of the Next”, “Free Palestine”, “Fuck Joe Biden”, and “America is over!” As the march proceeded around the strip it grew to close to 300 gathering students, tourists, preps, punks, and more off the strip that was full of life for the first time in years. On the first lap the march stopped in front of PKs where a punk musical festival was taking place and the participants sang an old folk song of resistance with modified lyrics, “The end of one world, the beginning of many. Which president? We don’t want any! We will build each other’s freedom. Carry it on, carry it on.”

The march made another lap around the strip and ended by dispensing back into the punk neighborhood. While the march was a joyous celebration of the eclipse and the coming end of America, the march must also be understood as taking up a historical tradition that the police in Carbondale have tried their hardest to kill over the last four decades. For decades the people of Carbondale joyously would close down the strip and make its use free to party goers. Halloween was the grandest of these street takeover parties stretching all the way from the late 70s to the year 2000. In the year 2000 as the police lost control of the party and streets once again the pigs and the city finally banned Halloween for 18 long years which coincided with the decline of the city and university.

This march on April 7th was the first massive taking of the strip for a festive party since the early 2000s and the largest march to take the strip unpermitted since the first night of the George Floyd Rebellion in 2020. The march proved the power of ordinary people to take the strip back and force the police to close highways for our joyous right to party and play there. Going forward we hope the lesson has been learned that the strip belongs to us Carbondaliens and not the pigs or the crooks in City hall. May the two glorious eclipses that have passed through our region be a reminder that the pigs and this empire one day too will be eclipsed!

Announcing upcoming forest defense gathering in so-called California. Go to Lost Sierra Forest for more information.

Calling All Forest Defenders! Join us for a Forest Defense-Climate Action Camp May 23-29. We’ll be setting up just outside the Plumas National Forest (not far from the town of Paradise, which burned down in 2018 after widespread logging) where the U.S. Forest Service hopes to log 274,000 acres under the phony guise of “wildfire fuel reduction,” spewing 6 million tons of carbon dioxide and $30 million in toxic pesticides, including in ancient rainforest, while fueling 2 polluting “biomass” pellet factories!

This is just one part of U.S. Forest Service unscientific “emergency action” logging, putting almost 1 million acres of carbon-storing, wildlife-sheltering public forests on the chopping block over the last year alone.

Tentative Workshop Schedule Includes:

• Tree Climbing
• Medicinal and rare Plant Walk
• Wildland Survival Skills
• Debunking “Wildfire Fuel Reduction” Logging
• Forest Orienteering
• Everything Wrong with the “Central and West Slope Project” (274,000 acres of logging in Plumas National Forest)
• Tree Identification
• Forest Biomass Energy is not Clean, Green nor Renewable
• Wilderness First Aid
• Legal Strategies for Forest Protection

Check https://lostsierraforest.wordpress.com for updates email us at lostsierra_forest [at] proton.me to RSVP or if you’d like to lead a workshop.

There is an unresolvable tension present in the valleys, mountains, deserts, jungles, and highlands of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, between the communal forms of social organization, and the forms and subjects of the State and capital. This tension dates back to the so-called conquest, and has remained permanent, although with different intensities, over the past 500 years.

It’s been often said that Oaxaca is communal, and it’s worth repeating. Different structures and expressions of community life—communal land, community assemblies, collective work, and communal festivities—are present in different forms, and at different scales, in the communities, agencies, and municipalities that make up the state of Oaxaca.

Of the 570 municipalities in the state, 418 of them organize and elect their authorities with the assembly as the maximum decision-making power in the municipality. Within municipalities, at more local levels, there are community and neighborhood level assemblies. There are also a multiplicity of other community and neighborhood collective structures, like councils of elders and women, neighborhood water, festival, and electricity committees, religious committees, and others, which depending on the specifics of the particular location, are organized around assemblies.

These different expressions of collective decision-making and collective management of basic necessities are complemented and strengthened by, and directly connected with other forms of collectivity: collective work in benefit of the community (tequios or faenas as they are called in Oaxaca), community festivities, extended family mutual aid and support, etc.

Perhaps most importantly is the ongoing existence of common lands. In Oaxaca around 80% of the land is collectively managed. Directly linked to the collectively managed lands are collective decision-making structures; communal lands are organized and managed by assemblies of comuneros, and ejidal lands are organized and managed by assemblies of ejido members.

It’s important to stress that these different forms of organization aren’t without their difficulties, and assemblies aren’t anywhere near perfect, nor are they the answer to everything. These different processes on the ground are riddled with complexities, local power struggles, pressure from governments to control, regulate, and co-opt. Yet, they represent the power of collective and communal organization in Oaxaca, and they have shown to be a powerful force in defense of autonomy and territory.

It goes without saying, these different communal and collective forms of organization often clash with the interests of the State to individualize, map, regulate, register, and control, and the interests of capital to dispossess, exploit, privatize, and plunder. The tactics of the State and capital to dis-articulate these communal forms of organization have taken a variety of different forms from assassinations and imprisonment of community organizers, to community division and co-optation. Collectively managed lands have continually been in the State and capital’s crosshairs.

In 1992, the Mexican president passed an agrarian reform setting the stage for the signing of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This agrarian reform opened up communal and ejidal lands to the possibility of privatization, something that was previously impossible.

This process was followed by a series of government programs including the Program for the Certification of Agrarian Rights (PROCEDE) and the Program of Regularization and Record of Agrarian Juridical Acts (RRAJA) to map and certify community and ejidal lands. Linked to these programs, the government has offered incentives—social programs, fertilizers, money, tax benefits, etc.—to those with individual titles, pressuring communities to privatize their lands.

Most recently, the Salomón Jara government in Oaxaca passed a tax revenue law for the fiscal year of 2024 in the state of Oaxaca seeking again to push community and ejido members to privatize their lands. Through the revenue law, the State was offering discounts and fiscal benefits to those who would take the necessary steps toward registering and titling their lands under the regimen of private property, arguing that the privatization of land would lead to more state and municipal revenue. The Indigenous and campesino communities of Oaxaca quickly organized, denouncing the bill, and forced the Oaxacan government to repeal it.

The ongoing attempts to privatize communal land in Oaxaca by the State are connected to its desire to do away with communal decision-making, and the collective forms of neighborhood, community, and municipal self-management that are linked to them. It’s part of the incessant drive to squeeze out the autonomy of the communities and municipalities. It’s part of the project to impose authorities and megaprojects, to convert Indigenous peoples and campesinos into subjects that reproduce the forms of capital and the State.

And Oaxaca is currently ground zero of an aggressive territorial reorganization taking place in southern Mexico, which includes the imposition of the Interoceanic Corridor megaproject. And of course, the lands on which they seek to build the pipelines and industrial parks, the train lines and wind farms, that are associated with this project are overwhelmingly communal or ejidal, and the communities overwhelmingly organize in community assemblies. The communal lands, and the collective management of that land, is a major obstacle to the imposition of the megaproject.

Amidst ongoing attacks on communal and collective life in Oaxaca, from the State, organized crime, and private companies, these expressions of communal and collective organization continue existing, sometimes in the subtlest of ways embedded in everyday life, and other times in tremendous explosions of popular protest. The strengthening and expanding of these collective forms of organization will undoubtedly be central to the ongoing resistance in the state of Oaxaca and beyond.

Thousands took part in mass direct actions and blockades on Monday, in protest of the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing within the occupied Palestinian territories by the state of Israel and supported directly by the United States. The demonstrations take place against a backdrop of rising public support for a ceasefire and also represented a dramatic turn toward direct action and more autonomous, horizontal organizing efforts and away from simply symbolic mass marches and demonstrations.

As the A15 Actions account wrote:

Over 65 cities, 19 countries and six continents took collective risk for a liberated Palestine. This is just the beginning. Activists across the globe carried out large-scale actions Monday as part of A15, a coordinated economic blockade in solidarity with Palestine.

U.S. organizers blockaded factories and corporate offices of weapons manufacturers, including the Boeing plant in St. Charles, Missouri; Pratt & Whitney in Middletown, Connecticut; and the Lockheed Martin building in Arlington, Virginia.

Protesters took over major roads in Philadelphia and Oakland, while others rallied in front of government buildings and cultural sites. In San Francisco, activists shut down both sides of the Golden Gate Bridge in a major disruption to traffic in the Bay Area.

Activists in New York marched across the Brooklyn Bridge and rallied on both the Brooklyn and Manhattan sides of the iconic bridge. Dozens of people were arrested in the peaceful action, including reporters covering the protest.

Across multiple cities, police made hundreds of arrests and in Fremont, shot off projectile weapons in an attempt to stop demonstrators from blockading a Telsa factory, while in Montreal, protesters were attacked by teargas and batons. Just as they did under Trump, Republican bureaucrats like Tom Cotton called for far-Right vigilante violence against demonstrators stating, “I would encourage most people anywhere that gets stuck behind criminals like this who are trying to block traffic to take matters into their own hands [and] put an end to this nonsense.” In the face of the success of the A15 actions, many pundits on the Right and neo-liberal Center have also started a fear mongering campaign about the movement using “escalated tactics,” while student organizers continue to face expulsions, evictions, and repression.

Via @ColumbiaSJP

But the movement in solidarity with Palestine has been defined by elite forces attempting to falsely brand it as “pro-Hamas” or “anti-Semitic.” But far from the movement getting smaller, it has instead grown in size and popularity. Speaking to this reality, on April 17th, an encampment of “hundreds of students” at Columbia university was erected, with the organizers writing on social media:

As of 4 AM this morning, Columbia University students have occupied the center of campus, launching our Gaza Solidarity Encampment. We demand divestment and an end to Columbia’s complicity in genocide.

As of this writing the occupation remains ongoing, with students marching in a solidarity picket around the encampment in the face of the marshaling of the NYPD. Workers at Google have also launched sit-ins against their company’s involvement in Israeli apartheid. and students at Georgia State University protested the GILEE program, which networks US based law enforcement with IDF forces and trains them in counter-insurgency techniques.

Via @NoTechApartheid

Check out our roundup of actions on April 15th below and follow A15 Actions here. To contribute to the A15 bail fund, go here.

Pacific Northwest

Via @stopthesweeps_eugene

Eugene, OR: “In Eugene, Oregon, protesters blocked Interstate 5, shutting down traffic on the major highway for about 45 minutes.” A noise demo followed in support of those who were arrested by police. According to a post on Instagram:

Today Eugene shut down I5 for over an hour in solidarity with the international A15 day of action for a free Palestine!

We know that the US government is complicit in this genocide. We know the US will not stop this genocide, and so we have to stop it ourselves. We are done being passive agents and know that it is time to escalate our actions to participate in a global resistance movement for a free Palestine! Israel is the right arm of the United States imperialist war machine. What we are seeing in Palestine now is the same violent, genocidal land theft that has been carried out on indigenous people all over the world since the dawn of colonization. We will no longer be complicit.

Over 50 people were arrested and 8 cars impounded. Please donate to our car impound fund:

@freethecars
@eugenebailfund

Via @a15actions

Hillsboro, OR: According to a post on Instagram:

Today with the organization of Portland DSA and the national @a15actions, comrades blocked two entrances to Intel’s Ronler Acres campus in Hillsboro, Oregon. We denounce our representatives and local businesses support of Zionist connections to Israel that continue to provide technology that assists in the genocide, destruction, displacement, starvation and ecocide of Palestinians. Intel has blood on their hands and we’re here to remind Intel, their employees, the community, our elected officials and the world that we refuse to accept Intels continued profiting from mass murder.

Zionists showed up burning Quran. Another drove into protestors with his truck. The Hillsboro police department let him drive off after 7+squad cars arrived within moments of the incident. The police told is to come into the station if we wanted to file a complaint. A reminder that cops support corporations and capitalism, not tax paying citizens.

Via @treesittersunion

Wolf Creek, OR: A tree-sit resisting the logging of old-growth forest posted a statement in solidarity with the A15 blockades, writing:

State agencies such as the BLM selling corporations permission to extract profits from this land is a form of colonial violence. We view the actions we’re taking here to stop extractive industry and challenge the political and economic structures that enable it as one very small piece of a broader struggle against colonization and state violence. We won’t stand aside while corporations render our planet inhabitable and are here to prevent industrial logging of this forest, but we aren’t here to dictate what the forest “should be” or advocate for more “nature reserves” – we’re after something much more liberatory. We’re here in solidarity with resistance against the genocidal dystopia those in power have been creating over the last 500 years – from the movement to stop cop city to Palestinian resistance fighters defending their right to be in their lands.

Traffic backs up at SeaTac Airport in Seattle. Source: @A15Actions

Seattle, WA: Almost 50 people were arrested after protesters blocked the road into SeaTac airport for several hours. According to a post on Instagram about the action:

Seattle protestors have blocked the roadway to Seattle Tacoma International Airport to demand the US stops arming Israel.

For months, representatives have ignored the overwhelming calls for a permanent ceasefire made by Americans across the political spectrum, instead continuing to approve aid packages that use billions of taxpayer dollars to arm Israel. They have ignored international law and court rulings, instead offering complete impunity to Israel as it blocks humanitarian aid from entering Gaza while targetting hospitals, journalists, and thousands of innocent civilians. All while American people are deprived of housing, healthcare, and other basic needs that could be met with these U.S. resources.

Alaska Airlines flights represents over half of passenger flights into and out of SeaTac – in addition to contracting with Boeing, who manufactures weapons used in Israel’s deplorable and unlawful attacks on Palestinian civilians, Alaska Airlines supports Israel through partnership with EL AL Israel Airlines.

Seattle will not be complicit in genocide!

Pacific

San Francisco, CA: Protesters blockaded and shut down the ironic Golden Gate Bridge. As the SF Chronicle reported, “On the Golden Gate Bridge, protesters chained themselves to parked cars to block vehicles from traveling across the famous span and held a banner that read: “Stop the world for Gaza.”’

Via @a15actions

Oakland, CA: On the other side of the bay, protesters marched and also shut down the I-880 in both directions. As the SF Chronicle reported, “The protests broke out early in the morning, Interstate 880 was blocked in Oakland in both directions and some protesters chained themselves to concrete-filled barrels.” The disruptions on the freeway also included blockades into the Port of Oakland, where a representative from an association of tuckers at the port reported to a local Fox News affiliate that workers were honoring the pickets and that all port terminals had been shut down for the day.

A report posted to Instagram stated:

Thousands of people across Oakland, California blocked the flow of capital along the regions largest commercial interstate (I-880) in solidarity with the people of Palestine. On northbound 880, beginning at 6am, seven protestor locked themselves into six barrels of concrete weighing 280 Ibs each, welded at the top. Because of the difficulty for law enforcement to drill through, it is expected northbound will by shut for several hours.

I-880 serves as the region’s primary corridor for commercial freight, seeing millions of dollars in goods moved everyday. The highway connects the Port of Oakland, the Oakland Airport, and the West Oakland railyards, and is a choke point at which protesters blockaded a part of the US economy for its complicity in genocide.

Interstate 880, running from San Jose to the Macarthur Maze in Oakland serves as the Bay Area’s major corridor for freight traffic, with trucks weighing more than 9,000 pounds prohibited from accessing I-580 through Oakland. This funneling of commercial traffic through historically working class, Black and Latinx neighborhoods creates an uneven environmental hazard for those along its route, but it also provides a unique target for a strategic economic blockade.

In halting traffic along this route we seek to stop the movement of millions of dollars in daily capital flow, much of which, headed to and from the Port of Oakland, the Oakland Airport, and the nearby rail yards directly and indirectly supports the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Global capital is complicit in the war crimes occurring daily against Palestinians, and it also hurts us here at home. Increased cases of respiratory ailments and cancer are but some of the signs of this uneven devastation at home in Oakland. The genocide in Gaza is the horrible cost visited upon our comrades and brothers and sisters abroad. We are shutting down 880 to disrupt the global flow of capital that causes so much destruction across the world. We are shutting down 880 in support of a liberated Palestine.

Photo of sabotaged parking meters in Oakland. Source: @A15Actions

Oakland, CA: A communique also posted to social media also claimed responsibility for sabotaging “60 parking meters…in Downtown Oakland…” The report read:

Submitted anonymously: Autonomous #A15 activists made about 60 parking meters unusable in Downtown Oakland and around Lake Merritt, drawing connections of state violence from the Bay to Palestine.

Along with jamming up the card readers and coin slots, they posted stickers saying, “Parking tickets are a war tactic the state uses to attack the working class. From Oakland to Palestine: WE WILL FIGHT BACK!”

Parking fees and tickets put poor and working class people in a choke hold and restrict our right to mobility. In some cases, if parking tickets aren’t paid within two months, the price increases to nearly $200. If you want to get on a payment plan in Oakland, you have to PAY to get on the payment plan. If you have unpaid parking tickets, there is NO WAY to register your car without paying them, which then puts you at risk of getting more tickets and your car impounded.

The state deploys and funds endless, violent control tactics using our tax dollars. Some seemingly small and unassuming like endless fees & tickets, and some bigger, more visibly evil like building bombs. Regardless of their tactics, we will no longer tolerate the state stealing money from working class people to fund war here and abroad!!

From Oakland to Palestine to Congo to Sudan to Ethiopia to all oppressed people everywhere: WE WILL FIGHT BACK!

Rally for Palestinian liberation in Fremont, California. Source: @A15Actions

Fremont, CA: Hundreds marched in the South Bay city of Fremont, shutting down a Telsa plant. According to KTVU, “Police have deployed pepper balls on Pro-Palestinian demonstrators participating in a ‘Blockade the Bay’ Day of Action outside the Fremont Tesla plant, on Monday evening.” Despite the police violence, demonstrators claimed victory in shutting down the facility for the day.

A report on social media reported:

South Bay officially concludes “BLOCKADE THE BAY” on April 15th with the action at Tesla today which followed the successful blockades in SF and Oakland! Why Tesla? Tesla is complicit in the genocide in Palestine and the genocide in Congo. While Israel blocks aid from entering Gaza, Zionist Elon Musk pledges funds to Israel, we stood in solidarity today with Gazans and blocked his shipments trucks. Last night around midnight, Tesla laid of 10% of their workforce. Some workers showed up to work today not knowing that they were laid off. Tesla’s labor abuses have no end. Today’s action caused management to send workers home EARLY. WE SHUT DOWN THE FACTORY!

200+ people came out, zero arrests were made and hundreds of injuries including both physical and chemical from the tear gas! After protestors dispersed, got tear gassed, and shot at with tear gas canisters and pepper balls – the road was STILL BLOCKED! The blockade kept going even though we weren’t there anymore! Police incompetence led to the freeway remaining shut down even after we left. 6+ hours of delays to shipping and receiving partial and then full blockade, concluding a loss of estimates for Tesla were in the million$! We consider today to be a win – s/o to the Bay! Power to the people!

Long Beach, CA: Demonstrators shut down the 710 freeway in Long Beach. A report posted to social media stated:

On April 15, activists in Long Beach took bold action, participating in a worldwide movement to disrupt the flow of global capital in solidarity with Palestine. The action joined protests in 56 cities across 6 continents, with people everywhere demanding liberation now. 🇵🇸✊🔻

This stretch of the 710 Freeway in Long Beach is a primary artery for the 1st and 3rd largest shipping ports in the country. They handle 40 percent of all imports and 20 percent of all exports for the entire United States.

Activists stopped traffic and flew flags and banners at a major exit going in and out of the ports, making it known there will be no business as usual during a genocide. Later, they marched to City Hall to amplify the message: End the siege! End the occupation! Free Palestine!

The action coincided with Tax Day and signaled to the imperialist warlords in Washington that we won’t sit quiet while they misuse our incomes to fund Zionist bombs at the expense of education, healthcare, safety, and infrastructure.

People of conscience around the world will continue to stand up and shut it down for Palestine until Palestine is free—once and for all.

From the river to the sea, free Palestine!

Central

San Antonio, TX: As Al Jazeera reported, “In San Antonio, protesters holding Palestinian flags obstructed both sides of the Valero Energy Company headquarters, causing traffic congestion on the city’s northwest side.” A report posted to social media wrote:

For almost 6 months we have watched a genocide being enacted upon upon our Indigenous Palestinian siblings. We have witnessed unfathomable acts of cruelty and the martyrdom of children through our phones daily. We have sobbed alongside our siblings as they have cried out with soul tearing screams at the loss of their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, at the occupation of their land, at the destruction of their sacred spaces. It is within our power collectively to stop this genocide. And more importantly, collectively, it’s our responsibility to do so.

Why we chose target: A15 is a coordinated strike against the economy. Valero was chosen for it’s significant economic contributions to San Antonio, TX. However Valero has blood soaked hands and is deeply entagled with Israel making them an additional reason we chose them as target.

Valero Energy Corporation has been chosen locally because it is the main supplier of military-grade jet fuel (JP-8) to the Israeli military. Between 2020-2024, the company has sent a JP-8 tanker every other month from its Bill Greehey refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, to Israel. Its kerosene-based jet propulsion fuel called JP-8 powers Israel’s AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, its F-15 and F-16 fighter/bombers, as well as its Merkava tanks.

Midwest

Chicago, IL: According to CBS News, “In Chicago, protesters blocked a main access road to O’Hare International Airport for more than an hour…” A report posted to social media wrote:

​​​​On MONDAY 40 Chicagoans were arrested after blocking the entrance to O’Hare International Airport for 1 hour and 20 minutes. Most individuals were detained for at least 12 hours, and some up 18 hours. The significance of the site of action cannot be ignored, for the role that both Boeing and the U.S. government play in the genocide of Palestinians.

Via @stopweaponsmn

Maple Grove, MN: Outside of Minneapolis, demonstrators blockaded a Amazon facility. A report posted to social media wrote:

Early Monday morning several coordinated actions convened to stop operations at the Amazon shipping facility in Maple Grove, Minnesota as part of the international #a15actions coordinated economic blockade for a Free Palestine.

One autonomous group erected a blockade of the semi-truck exit, while a car caravan and picketers stopped all sprinter vans from leaving the facility with shipments. In the lot a group rallied and danced dabkeh, a traditional Palestinian dance. Outside of the facility another group gathered to chant and sing for the liberation of Palestine. More than one hundred shipping vehicles were delayed during this two hour blockade.

Amazon is deeply complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Last year, Amazon Web Services launched AWS Israel, committing to invest $7.2B in data and computing technology in Israel, much of which will support state and military operations. In a recent op-ed Amazon workers condemned the company’s support for Israel saying, “this technology allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land.”

As photos roll in from around the world of people shutting it down for Palestine, Minnesota is more convinced than ever that From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free!

Via @stopweaponsmn

St. Paul, MN: An anonymous claim of responsibility, first reported on by the Instagram account @stopweaponsmn, claimed credit for:

In the early hours of April 16th, a number of activists decided to remind Forward Edge ASIC to ‘Get a real job.’ They ask, ‘How many people did you murder at work today?’ ‘Why do your children matter more than theirs?’ And added ‘We think it’s really shitty you make microchips for bombs.’ Forward Edge ASIC, on Energy Park Drive in St Paul, is a research and development firm owned by Lockheed Martin that employs high-paid engineers and other white collar workers.

Via Abolition Media

Minneapolis, MN: A communique posted to Abolition Media claimed responsibility for smashing out windows to a Wells Fargo bank in Minneapolis and writing multiple graffiti slogans. From the communique:

In response to the A15 call for economic disruption, Anti-Colonial Action Brigade (ACAB) attacked a Wells Fargo branch in so-called ‘minneapolis’ (occupied Dakota lands) early morning Monday April 15.

We spraypainted “INTIFADA,” “FUCK 12,” “STOP COP CITY,” “DESTROY ZIONISM,” “Al-AQSA FLOOD,” “DEATH TO ‘israel,’” “DEATH TO amerika,” “AVENGE THE MARTYRS,” “FREE PALESTINE,” “FUCK COP CITY,” and smashed out six windows including the glass door.

Wells Fargo funds the genocide & colonization of Palestine through a $500 million loan to Elbit Systems, the zionist entity’s top drone manufacturer. In addition, a Wells Fargo executive sits on the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the parasites behind Cop City. We act in total solidarity with the movements resisting the carceral-colonial pig power structure in its various manifestations—whether a cop city in the Weelaunee Forest, or a euro-settler regime in Palestine.

Kansas City, MO: In Kansas City, a report posted to social media read:

Kansas City protestors disrupt construction of expanding Honeywell Nuclear Weapons facility! Dozens of citizens from @peaceworkskc , Midwest Catholic Workers, and @freepalestinekc took action in solidarity with the #A15 global call for Palestine.

Via @a15actions

St. Charles, MO: Right outside of St. Louis, demonstrators held a blockade outside of a Boeing facility. A post on social media reported:

Organizers in St. Louis today joined the global call of A15 Action to disrupt the portions of our economy and production that facilitate colonialism and genocide. Protesters returned to Boeing Manufacturing Plant 598 in St. Charles, Missouri for the third time, blocking 3 of the facility’s gates. Early Monday morning, 8 protesters locked themselves to several of the gates, preventing workers and shipments from entering for several hours. All were later arrested. The Boeing St. Charles facility is home of the Weapons Programs, producing Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) and GBU-39 Small Diabeter bombs, which were reportedly put on rush delivery to Israel in early October.

Detroit, MI: WXYZ reports that police clamped down on a car caravan protest, writing:

Detroit police quickly moved into position to stop a convoy of pro-Palestinian supporters who were headed to the Ambassador Bridge in their vehicles Monday in what may have been an attempt to shut down traffic at the bridge to Canada.

Southeast

Charlotte, NC: Activists in Charlotte, NC held a protest and blockade of Northrop Grumman. According to a report on Unicorn Riot:

Early Monday morning, activists put paint and screws in the driveway to the Northrop Grumman parking lot in South Charlotte and attached bike locks to the gate to prevent personnel from entering the property.

Northrop Grumman is the fourth-largest defense contractor in the world. Synoptics, a subsidiary, is located at the South Charlotte facility. It manufactures laser materials and components. Investigate, a website from the American Friends Service Committee, reports that Northrop Grumman manufactures weapons used by the Israeli military against Palestinians.

Around 8 a.m., activists gathered outside of Northrup Grumman to protest the facility, holding a large banner reading “Northrop Grumman has blood on their hands,” and other pro-Palestine slogans. The local collective Charlotte Uprising posted video and photos on their Instagram page.

Northrup Grumman has not been alone in facing pro-Palestine protests. Activists in Philadelphia blocked weapons manufacturer Day & Zimmermann on March 28, where 120mm tank rounds for Merkava tanks employed by Israel’s occupation forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as 155mm artillery rounds are manufactured. They also protested near the Philadelphia headquarters office in a morning march on April 15.

Miami, FL: In Miami, demonstrators faced arrests while attempting to blockade the entrance to the Port of Miami. According to the Miami Herald: 

Police on Monday arrested seven people who they say were blocking the entrance to PortMiami while participating in a pro-Palestine protest in Downtown Miami. In Florida, however, obstructing the roadway is a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine up to $1,000. Officials across the state have stressed the tactic is not an acceptable for of protest in Florida. The coalition said in a statement that the people arrested were “aggressively dragged and arrested by the police.”

Tampa, FL: Demonstrators in Tampa, FL organized street blockades. A report on social media wrote:

Tampa SHUT IT DOWN for Palestine yesterday! We were able to stop traffic, all the way down a major interstate. We will continue showing this city that we are sick and tired of funding this injustice. We are done being “too” nice. Disruption and revolting is our only answer. Don’t expect peace UNTIL we have peace. From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever.

Orlando, FL: Demonstrators gathered in Orlando, FL. According to Luke From DC on social media:

Orlando did not sit out this wave of protests. Answering the call from the A15 global organizers, protesters gathered at the Post Office, calling for a refusal to pay taxes that fund this war and a total blockade of the US economy. One of the chants asked taxpayers “how many kids did you kill today.” A speaker explicitly called on people to refuse to pay taxes that fund US bomb deliveries to Israel and to refuse to participate in the economy funding the genocide.

Arlington, VA: According to posts on social media, “On the 15th of April, DC area activists descended on a Northern Virginia office of Lockheed-Martin and shut it down with a hard lockdown including lockboxes.”

Northeast

Philadelphia, PA: Demonstrators in Philadelphia organized blockades and marches across the city. According to Unicorn Riot, “The crowd marched to the offices of arms manufacturers Day & Zimmerman, who provides components for weapons being used by Israel against Gaza.” A report on social media wrote:

The demonstrations began at 8:15 a.m., when dozens of protesters disrupted rush hour traffic as they waved Palestinian flags during a teach-in. Simultaneously, another group led a funeral procession of cars up I-95, while a third marched near City Hall, stopping at various locations to call attention to connections between Philadelphia’s economy and Israel’s occupation in Gaza.

The Philadelphia Police Department confirmed that 67 people were arrested for obstruction of highway during the morning protests. Officers issued civil citations to 41 demonstrators, who were then released from custody, said Sgt. Eric Gripp, a department spokesperson.” Philly Inquierer: https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/protests-gaza-palestine-irs-building-university-city-20240415.html

“In Philadelphia, people across the city took part in #PhillyA15 coordinated actions aimed at disrupting the local economy and blockading major traffic routes on the East Coast to demand an end to the genocide and occupation in Palestine being carried out by the apartheid government of Israel. Key weapons manufacturer, Day & Zimmerman, and Philadelphia City Hall both went on lockdown as a result of these actions.

Over 50 people blockaded the major intersection at 30th Street and Schuylkill Avenue, effectively stopping traffic on 76 in both directions. Across town a coordinated funeral procession mourning the slaughter of more than 38,000 Palestinians—including over 14,000 children—slowed traffic on both 95 north and south bound to a near stop, while Philly Palestine Coalition took to the streets in center city with 200 people who walked out of work in solidarity with the worldwide, coordinated economic blockade #A15. Sixty-nine people were arrested.

The Philadelphia economy is complicit in this ongoing genocide. In 2023, $23,657,015 of Philadelphia’s tax dollars were sent to Israel. Philadelphia is also home to weapons manufacturers Day & Zimmerman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, L3Harris, and Ghost Robotics who manufacture weapons of war that have been used by Israel.

It is within our collective power to stop this genocide. More importantly, it is our collective responsibility to do so. Find your humanity in the struggle! #PhillyA15 is everywhere, every day, until Palestine is Free! #a15forpalestine

Middletown, CT: Blockades to the entrance of the Pratt & Whitney factory in Middletown, CT took place. A report on social media stated:

Organizers from CT & NY have shut down the entrances to Pratt & Whitney factory in Middletown

This is in an effort to call out the companies complicity in arming the Israeli military during its assault on Gaza. This action is in solidarity with the A15 Action, a coordinated economic blockade in over 30 cities around the world.  Protestors are demanding that Pratt and Whitney end the company’s contract with Israel early, and begin the transition to a peace-based economy where the engines will not enable war and genocide.

Police have arrested 10 protestors so far. They can arrest us but they can’t arrest the movement, we will continue to #shutitdown for Palestine no matter what.

Elizabeth, NJ: Demonstrators organized a caravan was organized through the Port of New Jersey. A report posted to social media read:

As part of the @a15actions, early this morning in Elizabeth, NJ Port Workers For Peace with @nyclaborforpalestine and @palawda led a caravan of vehicles through the Port of New Jersey to denounce the Zim shipping company’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Zim CEO Eli Glickman has pledged that his ships will assist Israel’s campaign, even as it leads to mass starvation and the killing of over 17,000 children.

“Many port workers are horrified at what’s happening in Gaza,” said Chino May, one of the caravan organizers. “Our labor is being exploited to enrich corporations that uphold mass murder. But we make these companies go, so we can make them listen to us. The killing has to stop.”

The caravan received mostly honks of support and a few agitated truck drivers. Police flanked the lead car and the group, and at some points attempted to break the line of cars up by merging in between them. At one point the port authority police asked how long they would be there and if there were more coming, to which the police received one word answers and vague responses.

As we see global action taking place today across thousands of cities and economic choke points, the news will be flooded with Trump and Iran…don’t take your eye off the ball. This is focal point. All eyes on Gaza.

Brooklyn, NY: Protesters swarmed the Brooklyn bridge and faced arrests. According to CBS News: 

Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters rushed onto the Brooklyn Bridge Monday afternoon. Police said 44 people were issued summonses for disorderly conduct, and four people face criminal charges for things like assault and resisting arrest.

Via @hv4freepalestine

Newburgh, NY: Demonstrators shut down the westbound entrance to the Hamilton Fish Newburgh Beacon Bridge. Organizers posted to social media, writing:

Tax Day is a reminder that the Biden administration has made over 100 transfers of taxpayer dollars in military assistance to Israel since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. We refuse to allow business as usual to continue while Palestinians are murdered by Israel using American weaponry and tax dollars. Those committed to Palestinian freedom in the Hudson Valley have tried many tactics—we’ve demonstrated, we’ve lobbied our representatives, Pat Ryan and Marc Molinaro, for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, we’ve visited their offices, we’ve educated the public. Those on the highway today are done waiting on congressional representatives. We are committed to keeping up the pressure until the genocide ends and Palestine is free.

Manhattan, NY: A communique took credit for sabotaging the offices of BNY Mellon, which “invests heavily in the weapons manufacturer Elbit…” From the anonymous report:

In the latest hours of Monday, April 15th, an autonomous group of actionists painted BNY Mellon as part of a worldwide day of action in solidarity with Palestine. BNY Mellon invests heavily in the weapons manufacturer Elbit, as well as allows their employees to directly donate to Friends of the IDF.

In the presence of security, the artists sprayed their message and disappeared into the night. The glass building at 240 Greenwich street appears cold, impermeable, and more solid than our best efforts could ever hope to disrupt. As the spirit of autonomous organizing continues to escalate around the world, many friend groups are pleasantly surprised to find that denting the machine of capitalism and the brutality of imperialism are both feasible and necessary.

Via @mxtaliajane

New York City, NY: A communique posted online to social media claimed responsibility for breaking out windows on “multiple Chase Bank locations.” From the communique:

Initiating the global call for an economic blockade on April 15, early in the morning of Sunday, April 14, an autonomous group of anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist anarchists targeted multiple Chase Bank locations for its investments in Elbit Systems and the zionist entity in large – Chase Bank is the 6th largest stockholder in the weapons manufacturer creating the tools of mass destruction for the genocide in Gaza.

Through concentrating efforts around Wall St., which WOL is marching on this Monday, we target those with the most blood money invested in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Actionists sprayed red blood paint on the front facade of the bank, spray-painted messages reading “FUNDS GENOCIDE”, “DROP ELBIT” and “FREE GAZA,” chained up the front doors to the bank and sealed them shut with spray foam.

Heeding the call for an economic blockade, actionists locked up the bank to block the money invested in death. Chase Bank is closed on Sundays, and by locking up the doors, actionists were able to close down the sole entrance to the bank. NYPD scrambled to take down the chains and foam to make the storefront palatable to its money hungry Wall Street patrons, but Chase Bank is still stained blood red.

Chase accumulates wealth from stealing from the oppressed, and uses that money to fund the killing of the colonized. NO TO WALL ST! and We say NO to stock exchange market, where people invest in genocide of Palestinians by investing their money in weapon manufacturers.

Canada

Vancouver, BC: In Vancouver, demonstrators rallied and blockaded the Deltaport. According to a report on social media:

We have blockaded Deltaport as a part of #A15ForPalestine #A15Action #A15ShutitDown and calling on dock workers to respect our picket line and join us in solidarity with Palestinian people.

Ottawa, ON: In Ottawa, a blockade was organized. According to a report on social media:

Local activists and community members united to completely block the building where the EDC (Export Development Canada), is housed. EDC is one of the Canadian institutions which plays a direct role in the genocide in Gaza through policies of trade and export of arms and military technology to the Zionist entity. EDC facilitates trade with Zionist companies responsible for the bombing and killing of our people.

Community members gathered to send a clear message: not on our watch! People of conscience refuse to stand by and allow institutions like EDC to promote Canada’s arms trade with the Zionist entity, including the trade of military and illegal settlement goods, and profit off the blood of our families in Gaza and all around the world.

This is only the start. We will continue to target these institutions guilty of genocide, and will not stop until our demands are met: an immediate two-way arms embargo, an end to all diplomatic and economic relations between Canada and the Zionist entity, and the release of all Palestinian political prisoners.

Hands off Gaza! Hands off Palestine!

Via @a15montreal

Montreal, QC: Demonstrators in Montreal faced state repression as a blockade attempted to shut down the Port of Montreal. From one report, “Protesters in Montreal were met with intense state suppression while supporting their comrades in the Port of Montreal today. Police attempted to block the streets as protesters tried to push past. At least one officer pointed a firearm loaded with less than lethal projectiles (likely teargas), which are not supposed to be aimed at people, at marchers on two occasions. At a different location, other protesters were violently met with teargas and baton beatings. Though injuries are reported, no arrests have been noted at the time.” A report on social media went on to state:

Early this morning, hundreds of protesters answered the A15 call to action by convening a large rally near the Port of Montreal at its Rue Viau entrance. The Montreal action was just one part of an autonomous coordinated effort across over 50 cities and 6 continents that began April 15. When protestors arrived at the Port, they were met by violent state repression. Over fifty police met the crowd with pepper spray and batons, resulting in several injuries. A second group of protestors successfully entered the Port to shut down its internal rail network by raising a Palestinian flag on the tracks. The Port was shut down for over an hour, backing up morning traffic on Rue Notre-Dame. All protestors left the action safely, with no arrests reported. Protestors say they are calling for an end to Canadian complicity in genocide, and that they will continue to take action and disrupt the economy until Palestine is free.

Via @a15actions

Rouyn-Noranda, QC: A lockdown was organized against “Glencore [which] profits from Israeli colonization and contributes to the violation of human rights in Palestine. This is why supply to the Horne Foundry is targeted today. Glencore is one of the world’s largest powers. It is a commodities trading company that controls a significant portion of the natural resources market: metals, minerals, oil and grains. The company is involved in the Israeli extraction and trading of metals and minerals… Additionally, the historical ties between Glencore and the State of Israel are rich and long-standing. Founder of Glencore, Marc Rich was crucial to Israel’s oil supply after the 1973 war. His oil trade with Israel became a lifeline for the young.

Halifax, NS: Demonstrators faced arrests by police after carrying out various blockades. From a report on social media:

This morning comrades blockaded Hollis Street and Terminal to block traffic to the port where ZIM International has an office. 19 comrades were violently arrested by Halifax Regional Police and taken to the station on Gottingen St.

The Canadian economy is complicit in this genocide. As a port city, weapons and components leave the Halifax harbour for Israel regularly. Today Nova Scotians answered the call to block the arteries of capitalism, colonialism and #SHUTITDOWN

Report on ongoing Poor Windy tree-sit in Southern Oregon. For more updates, follow the Tree Sitter’s Union Media Collective.

In a sign that the agency is feeling growing pressure as a tree sit on a proposed timber sale enters its second week, the BLM unexpectedly cancelled the Baker’s Dozen project, another contentious mature and old growth logging proposal in Southern Oregon. The Baker’s Dozen project targeted over one thousand acres for aggressive logging, with stands of trees over 300 years old.

“The BLM can no longer ignore the widespread opposition to the agency’s mature and old growth logging projects. The cancellation of the Baker’s Dozen timber sale is a direct response to the countless community members and conservation organizations that have organized, commented, litigated and protested against these destructive projects,” said Rachel Stevens, a community activist with the tree sit. “And, of course, the threat that tree sitters like us might decide to set up more blockades.”

The tree sitters hung a banner in solidarity with the economic blockades of A15, reading “Los Pueblos Unidos Jamás Serán Vencidos – Palestina Libre”.

In a statement, the tree sitters tied the ongoing blockade of old growth logging to the genocide in Palestine: “State agencies such as the BLM selling corporations permission to extract profits from this land is a form of colonial violence. We view the actions we’re taking here to stop extractive industry and challenge the political and economic structures that enable it as one very small piece of a broader struggle against colonization and state violence.

The Biden Administration has committed to ending the practice of old growth logging on public lands, and the BLM is currently considering a rulemaking to establish greater protections for intact ecosystems, yet projects targeting mature and old growth forests continue to be implemented across the region. The Poor Windy project would log more than 15,000 acres, including 4,573 acres of mature and old-growth trees that are essential nesting, roosting and foraging habitat for the threatened northern spotted owl and many other species.

Concerned about the impacts of logging, which increases wildfire risk, impacts clean water, and drives climate change, community members started their occupation of old growth forests in the Poor Windy project on April 1 and have no plans to leave.

“The single largest threat to the remaining mature and old-growth forests on public land in Oregon are the agencies that are supposed to be protecting them” says Sam Shields, a community organizer supporting the tree sit. “This tree sit is exposing the inexcusable malpractice of the BLM. While politicians in Washington D.C. wax poetic about the importance of fighting climate change and protecting the environment, the chainsaws continue to run and these priceless ecosystems are being leveled faster than ever. We are the last line of defense for these priceless forests.”

Research has shown that industrial logging also increases wildfire severity and frequency by replacing fire resilient mature and old growth forests with mono-crop timber plantations, increasing threats to rural communities like the one around this sale. The project specifically targets old growth forests with proposed road construction, an increasingly common tactic used by the BLM to avoid regulatory oversight.

Poor Windy has been approved and there is active logging already taking place in some areas. The contentious project is one of countless sales being moved forward by the BLM despite legal challenges and criticisms about the impacts that they will have on habitat, wildfire, fresh water, and the climate. Studies have shown that Oregon’s forests are some of the most carbon-rich in the world, and that logging is the State’s single largest source of carbon emissions.

“Public forests are needed for public benefits, like carbon storage and wildfire resilience,” said Francis Eatherington, a long-time forest activist and Douglas County resident. “Instead they are being logging for private profit, lining the pockets of the timber millionaires at the expense of rural Oregonians.”

The logging will impact freshwater sources in the area, with streams and the fish that depend on them already being compromised by severe sedimentation from more than 320 miles of logging roads in the area. Additionally, studies have shown significant long-term decreased summer stream flows in areas converted from mature and old-growth forests into plantations.

Announcing the Montreal Anarchist Zine Fair in May of 2024. For more information, see the MTL Anarchist Zine Fair website.

Our weapons are courage and beautiful ideas.

Every year in May, the blossoming of spring invites anarchists to reflect upon subversive ideas and practices, from throughout history to present day. Total destruction of all authority is the project that sets our hearts on fire. We are wary of political strategies, and instead propose an anarchy wherein the means and ends are coherent, without waiting for the ‘right moment’, without compromise.

The fight for freedom is infinite, a constant which spans numerous lifetimes, and with endless possiblities. Only through permanent conflict will we create spaces where we can breathe (together) for short while, dreaming of and planning for total freedom.

This Fair is a moment to sharpen the analyses and critiques necessary for the project of insurrection. It’s goal is to nourish your imagination. We’re seeking out those who dream of unlimited freedom, and who are fighting for a complete upheaval of society, not simply it’s re-organization. Books, zines, meet-ups and discussions are indispensible for this project of liberation–they give meaning to our actions, and vice-versa.

We encourage (self)published texts created by comrades who aren’t trapped in the industry of book publishing. We want to free the pen from censorship, and the book from commercialization. We want texts to be distributed through autonomous organization, with the goal of sharing ideas with those who feel inspired by them. This can only occur in a free space, through rejecting copyrights and ‘alternative’ markets. This Fair is organized autonomously, through voluntary association and participation, and without any institutional support.

Join us on the 11 and 12 of May, 2024, under the Van Horne viaduct (North of the tracks). Come for two days of discussions, reading, music, and complicity. There will be several tables with zines and books under the viaduct, and with a few presentations followed by discussions in the little park nearby. There will be shows in the evening, as well as food and coffee onsite.

* We strongly suggest you leave your phones, cameras, and all other technological snitches far away from the event.

* The Fair will take place outside and regardless of weather conditions–come dressed appropriately.

* Details on the discussions topics and schedule to come.

LONG LIVE ANARCHY!

Long-running anarchist radio and podcast show The Final Straw speaks with Jeremy White about the repression of antifascists in San Diego.

A recent chat with Jeremy White, film-maker, activist, and street medic who’s facing prison time in what has been dubbed the “San Diego Antifa” case. You’ll hear Jeremy talk about what happened on January 9th, 2021 at the Stop The Steal rally, how the police interacted with members of American Guard and Proud Boys as they assaulted passers by, the conspiracy-theory driven DA Sommers Stephan and where the case was before it resumed on March 18th, after we recorded this chat. Jeremy also worked on a horror-comedy film called “Bitch Ass.”

• Transcription
• PDF (Unimposed)
• Zine (Imposed PDF)

Fundraising on the case:

• Give Butter to benefit two defendants in the case: http://givebutter.com/protest-defense-sandiego
• Instagram: @SuperPowerToThePeople

Fundraising for Tallcan, former defendant:

• Benefit concert Saturday, May 18th 2024 @Birdcage Comics
  165 W Hospitality Lane,
  Suite 17
  San Bernadino, CA 92408
  Doors @ 6pm / ALLAGES
  $8 Suggested donation / (no one will be turned away for lack of funds)
  The proceeds from this show will go to legal funds and family support.
  FEATURING LIVE PERFORMANCES BY:
  SEXETTE / GLORBO / THE HAIL MARIAS / DOVE / LOW SWEEP
• Venmo: @PUSHINGDOWNTHEWALLS
  Cashapp: $PUSHINGDOWNTHEWALLS
  Please put “TC” in the notes.

photo: Radical Graffiti

Statement from the International Antifascist Defense Fund on the ongoing repression of community organizers in Texas.

You might recall a certain degree of hysteria and pearl-clutching among right-wing media pundits when they found out that their cherished 2nd Amendment rights also applied to anti-fascists. This became abundantly clear to them when pistol-packing transphobes intent on disrupting a drag show in Texas and possibly making good on their threats to murder the attendees were stopped in their tracks by the presence of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club.

Of course, transphobes and their police pals couldn’t allow for such a thing. Attack #1 against the EFJBGC came in the form of bullshit arrests by the cops of three EFJBGC members (of course, the Defence Fund helped pay for their legal defense costs). Now, attack #2 has come in the form of a lawsuit filed by the “New Columbia Movement” (a self-described “Christian fascist fraternity” that seeks to forcibly convert everyone to Christianity, among other things), against two of the arrestees on the basis that their rights were violated when they were unable to physically attack attendees at the drag show! So now our friends have to deal with the costs and hassle of unjustified criminal charges and a vexatious lawsuit.

Our friends have set up crowdfunders to help them with this expenses here and also here. They also reached out to us directly for support, which we were more than happy to provide, because we believe that drag shows are a form of free expression that shouldn’t be shut down by death threats from bigots, just as we believe that the believe we need to have the backs of those who put themselves on the line to prevent those threats from being carried out. If you believe the same, hit those crowdfunding links! If you believe there’s a need for a standing fund to provide emergency support to anti-fascists in situations like what’s been described here, make a contribution to the Defence Fund today!

Analysis of growing far-Right movements centered around attacking trans people in so-called Canada.

There is a growing fascist movement in so-called Canada, it first appeared from the shadows as the Freedom Convoy which led directly to Hands Off Our Kids. While fascism has been a long time problem in Canada, and there were underground sects that morphed into this current movement, the point of this article isn’t a historical analysis on how it came to be, its to show the dangers of this specific movement that is largely being ignored or downplayed by anti-capitalists and anti-fascists, probably because it doesn’t fit the traditional definition of fascism, its closer to the third position. The third position isn’t the same as the commonly accepted kind of fascism, mostly differentiated by its relationship to capitalism and the ruling class. According to Don Hamerquist, traditional fascism is “a policy of capitalist reaction intended to counter the possibility of a serious working class challenge to capital.” Or as explained by anarchist Durruti, “When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself.” This article seeks to point out the similarities between the fascist far-Right and Third Position writings from Don Hamerquist, a militant communist and anti-fascist. Unfortunately this article doesn’t have a lot citation for the present day far-Right as it is largely based on first hand experience in Southern Ontario, an area rife with these people. The far-Right in this area is growing and recruiting alarmingly fast and the so-called left isn’t stepping up to counter them. This isn’t to say that the growing transphobic far-Right in so-called Canada is theoretically identical to the historical third position fascism, however there are a lot of parallels in Don Hamerquists writings on the third position comparable to today’s far-Right in so-called Canada. It’s unclear if the current far-Right is intentionally trying to copy the third position, these parallels may not be intentional. The danger of this movement needs to be acknowledged if we have any hope of defeating the current far-Right and their bigotry.

In “Third Position” published May 2001 Hamerquist wrote about this brand of fascism being overtly pro-working class which is a rhetoric espoused by the Freedom Convoy. He also writes about it in Fascism & Anti-Fascism, “It [Third Position] makes a direct appeal to a working class audience with a warped, but militant, socialist racialist-nationalist program of decentralized direct action.” The Freedom Convoy appealed to the working class, is decentralized as well as extremely nationalist in character. The convoy was always rife with the far-Right and anti-trans rhetoric they just hid it from their mainstream discourse. They built a base with a seemingly innocent stance of “protect kids” and “freedom from the government” but protecting children from the trans agenda is a guise they use to hide the beginning stages of an outright trans genocide. Hitler wasn’t a third positionist, he was a traditional fascist, but this is similar to how he claimed to be protecting children from Jewish people.

Far-Right ideology is insidious, fascists look for vulnerable people, warping facts and using logical fallacies to recruit to their cause. The far-Right also uses the culture wars to recruit to their cause and so-called leftists (especially those online) can be absolutely useless when it comes to countering said phenomena. Examples of far-Right recruitment tactics include going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and recruiting vulnerable people from said meetings. Also finding vulnerable women who have survived medical trauma and winning them to the far-Right with pseudo science. This has a large overlap with trad wives (for more information read Sister’s in Hate by Seyawrd Darby). Some people in the far-Right movement are useful idiots who are gullible, and desperate for community because of the isolation from capitalist individualism. Community, compassion and patient explanation can work in the beginning phases of bringing people back from this kind of ideology. But there comes a point where they are too far gone and sadly lost to the world of the far-Right. They have become fascists; enemies of the class struggle and the oppressed.

Hands Off Our Kids is not a white supremacist movement. However it is a fascist, religious fundamentalist movement composed of various Abrahamic religions and far-Right, transphobic ideology. The “left” in so-called Canada is largely being white saviors about this, preferring to see trans people murdered in cold blood than cast aside their postmodern, romanticization of BIPOC communities. This has serious “noble savage” racist vibes. Just because someone is a member of one oppressed demographic that doesn’t mean they get to be oppressive towards other groups. The trans community does not need this bastardization of the oppression olympics from white cis saviours, we need to abolish oppression in every form. Black Lives Matter correctly pointed out that white LGBTQ+ people can be racist, so we need to apply that logic to other forms of oppression. The far-Right is gaining traction fast, while we do need to be careful this doesn’t turn into racism and islomophobia, there is presently a growing violent movement against trans people and that movement needs to be eliminated.

This rising far-Right movement isn’t identical to textbook third position but if we look at another Hamerquist quote from Fascism & Anti-Fascism “the so-called “third position” – a fascist variant that present itself as “national revolutionary” with politics that are “beyond left and right”.” One paragraph down in the same text he cites their support for liberation movements such as Ireland and Palestine. It needs to be stressed what’s going on in Palestine is a genocide and Palestine should be free, Zionism is fascism. However the white far-Right supports the Palestine liberation movement because they equate Zionism with Judaism, and are extremely anti-Semitic. While there are white supremacist elements in the far-Right movement, the movement as a whole is not traditional white supremacy. They are a kind of fascism akin to the third position.

Hamerquist says it best in his essay Fascism & Anti-Fascism, “Two points: First, there is a real potential for working relationships and alliances between white fascist movements and various nationalist and religious tendencies among oppressed peoples. In no way does this potential involve the denial of the reality of white supremacy and racial and national oppression. It only means that the left cannot count on the responses to this pattern of oppression, privilege and domination fitting into its neat and comfortable categories. Second, there is no reason to view fascism as necessarily white just because there are white supremacist fascists. To the contrary there is every reason to believe that fascist potentials exist throughout the global capitalist system. African, Asian, and Latin American fascist organizations can develop that are independent of, and to some extent competitive with Euro-American “white” fascism.” A few paragraphs later he writes “In this country and around the world some of these fascist blocs will be, and, in fact, already are, Black and Brown.” While he is talking about America, Canada has enough similarities one can apply the same lesson to our own home grown fascist movement.

On a similar note, Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists (TERFs) are pouring into anti-capitalist and working class spaces in so-called Canada. This again ties to Hamerquist’s position about the third position guising itself as working class. They guise their beliefs as working class feminism, use white women tears and the women are nice effect to vilify trans people, and men all too often revert to misogyny and protecting women who are perceived as the weaker sex, siding with the TERFs to further platform their bigotry. Plenty of feminists and BIPOC women have written very astute pieces about white woman tears regarding racism. For those unfamiliar with white woman tears, in a nutshell what happens is a white woman cries about how mean a BIPOC person was to them (often this BIPOC person was trying to address racism and discrimination). The white men in the room see the woman crying and immediately rush to her defense, because of conscious or unconscious misogyny they perceive women as the weaker sex and in need of protection. This is linked to the women are nice effect, which is the form of sexism that perceives women as more compassionate and delicate than men. Ironically women being the weaker sex who need a man to protect them is a pillar of trad wife ideology. Again this logic and type of oppressive behavior needs to be applied to transphobia if we want to end oppression in the fight against capitalism and fascism. Cis women do this to perpetuate transphobic and trans exclusive ideology. This forces trans people out of anti-capitalist and working class spaces. It’s also worth noting that not every person who does this is far-Right, some are just liberals, but regardless of their intentions liberals always end up helping the far-Right perpetuate their bigotry, they never actually help those being targeted. Racism is also a very real problem. This is not intended to take away from discussions about racism, but rather amplify BIPOC and women’s voices regarding this type of oppression and apply it to transphobia.

Far-Right bigotry has real word consequences. Doctors are hesitant to treat trans patients, especially youth. Some medical centers are even stopping their programs for trans youth because of far-Right intimidation. This is going to cause a rise in trans kids being traumatized and dying by suicide. Surgery, puberty blockers and hormone therapy saves lives. Puberty blockers are a temporary pause button that can eliminate the need for some surgeries and also stop irreversible changes caused by puberty. Puberty for trans people living with dysphoria is awful and traumatic. Trans people in Canada are being violently attacked but no official statistics are available because the trans community learned long ago not to trust police. Even if trans violence is reported cops don’t give a shit, which skews the potential for accurate statics even further. There have been at least two trans masculine youth murdered this year, Nex Benedict and Alex Franco. There are probably more who have gone unreported because of transphobia and the denial of our existence. There are also first hand reports on social media of the far-Right opening fire on trans women, queer bashings, and even attempts to run trans people over with cars/trucks. The last two happening in Southern Ontario. Hitler also targeted the trans community, Night of Long Knives and the infamous Nazi book burning destroyed the records Magnus Hirschfeld, a doctor who was medically treating dysphoria in trans people. Targeting the medical establishment was an early step of trans genocide in Nazi Germany, and its being targeted today by the far-Right in Canada.

So what can be done? Trans people need to do everything they can to defend ourselves. Enough of this “tender queer” bullshit, recognize we are fighting for our lives and start fighting back. If you aren’t trans, educate yourself on what transphobia and trans exclusive radical feminism looks like and actually stand up for us, not online, in the real world. If you care about anti-fascism it needs to be recognized that this isn’t a “culture war” its the beginning phases of a genocide. Treat it accordingly. Stop playing into the neo-liberal culture wars, this includes performative language/actions, safer spaces policies, clout chasing and diversity quotas. Fine tuning the terms and language we use to talk about transphobia won’t stop fascism. This kind of rhetoric can be pretty common in anarchist spaces in Southern Ontario, what we need is more propaganda by the deed. Reading more theory about direct action, anti-fascism and anarchism is complimentary to direct actions. Direct actions with no education is running around in circles but theory with no direct action is an academic circle jerk. As queer revolutionaries we need to start balancing these things. Deplatform assholes spewing TERF and anti-trans rhetoric, treat it the same you would any other form of fascism and bigotry.

Start taking this seriously, trans people are fighting for our lives and we can’t do it alone.

photo: Indybay.org

Molotov Now! speaks with members of PDX Jail support about their organizing efforts, mutual aid, and building widespread jail support.

A member of PDX Jail Support joins Molotov Now! to discuss their efforts creating a culture of mutual aid based around the idea of widespread community jail support. They have spent the last four years building a network of volunteers to stand outside local jails and connect with people coming out of jail. This is done with all arrestees, not simply when there is a need for increased jail support following a protest event.

We will also be debuting the audiozine we collaborated on with them detailing how to build a jail support network where you live. We hope you find this episode as inspiring as we did. It really lit a fire in us to get something similar going here where we live. The potential for radicalization is immense in these highly vulnerable and personal connections.

Check out more of Molotov Now! on Sabot Media.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Announcement from Amplifier Films about their recent videos covering ongoing blockades by Nehirowisiw land defenders in so-called Quebec.

Amplifier Films has recently launched English versions of their critical video reports on the ongoing blockades by the Nehirowisiw Land Defenders in Quebec, aiming to bring international attention to these significant Indigenous and environmental issues. The first video, capturing a tense yet crucial confrontation near Wemotaci on March 18th, and the second, detailing a day of action and determination by the Land Guardians of Nehirowisiw Aski, were initially released in French to engage a Quebec audience directly. Now, with their English counterparts, the outreach is expanded, inviting global support for the defenders’ cause against the clearcutting of Nitaskinan.

A new development has been the erection of another blockade in Opiticiwan on April 9, 2024. This action signifies the continuous effort of the Nehirowisiw people to safeguard their ancestral lands and protest against ongoing exploitation and environmental abuses. These blockades, part of a larger movement including actions in Manawan and across Nehirowisiw territory, underscore the community’s fight against deforestation, the disruption of wildlife habitats, and the erosion of their traditional ways of life.

Context of the Ongoing Blockades

The ongoing blockades by the Nehirowisiw (Atikamekw) community in Wemotaci, Quebec, are part of a broader effort to protect their ancestral territories from deforestation and logging activities that they say have gone beyond agreed boundaries and have not included meaningful consultation or respect for their traditional way of life. These blockades, part of actions across Nehirowisiw territory including Manawan, have been set up in response to logging operations that community members say disrupt wildlife habitats, affecting traditional activities and the environmental health of their land.

In one instance, a family in the Nehirowisiw community reported that a logging company ventured into a maple grove beyond the area that was agreed upon for logging, despite a standing agreement aimed at protecting the grove. This has led to members of the community, including those from Manawan, camping out and protesting to assert their rights and to demand that their voices be heard in the management of their territories​ (APTN News)​.

Additionally, Wemotaci officials served a legal notice to the Quebec Ministry of Forests, Fauna, and Parks in mid-February, accusing them of not consulting the community or including them in decision-making processes about logging on their territory. Chief Francois Neatshit of Wemotaci highlighted the negative impacts on wildlife habitat and traditional ways of life, signaling a broader concern about environmental degradation and loss of culture​ (APTN News)​.

A blockade was set up in May after conflict between land defenders and Nehirowisiw forestry employees, showing a direct action response to these concerns. The blockade was dismantled, but reports suggest that blockading actions might resume, especially with environmental factors like forest fires temporarily halting logging operations​ (PBI Canada)​.

The struggle also saw legal dimensions, with a Quebec Superior Court injunction against an Nehirowisiw blockade in Wemotaci, providing a 10-day window for the demonstrators to remove their blockade. This legal action underscores the tensions between the community’s efforts to protect their land and the governmental and corporate interests in forestry​ (APTN News)​.

It’s important to note that the blockades and protests are not just about stopping logging but are a part of a larger demand for respect, consultation, and co-management of the lands that are central to the Nehirowisiw way of life. Community leaders have expressed a willingness to negotiate and to be part of the decision-making processes that affect their lands, indicating a path forward that includes respect for Indigenous rights and environmental stewardship​ (Newswire)​.

About Amplifier Films

Amplifier Films is an initiative by Franklin López, the founder and former member of subMedia, aimed at amplifying underreported struggles for liberation. This new project seeks to bring crucial attention to the voices and battles of those fighting for environmental protection, Indigenous rights, and social justice around the globe.

You can follow Amplifier Films and support their mission on various platforms:

• YouTube: AmplifierFilmsMTL
• Facebook: AmplifierFilmsMTL
• Instagram: @amplifierfilmsmtl
• Mastodon: https://kolektiva.social/@AmplifierFilms

Report and analysis from Austin Autonomedia about the Smash By Smash West counter-summit in so-called Austin, Texas. To listen to an interview on the It’s Going Down podcast about the counter-summit, go here.

Strolling down the thumping, plastered downtown streets that SXSW treat as its campus, you are likely to have a free can of “C4” shoved in your face. This energy drink named after an explosive is the perfect symbol of what the festival-conference has to offer: a cloying and too seamless blend of brand consciousness, work cultism, consumerist reverie, and militarism. The can is a bomb lobbed at you– but one you are meant to gleefully let blow you up to improve your status and efficacy within the capitalist-imperialist project.

Watching Southby’s lanyard wearing throng drink down these noxious narratives left us with a seething desire to knock the can out of their hands, to shout the truth to the heavens, to shake some sense into the world around us. And so we did.

Whether answering SmashXSmashWest’s call for Divestment and Disruption or following their own paths, autonomous crews of protesters, revolutionaries, and hooligans made their presence known downtown last week, ripping through layers of self-congratulatory spectacle to reveal the conference’s deep cynicism, moral bankruptcy, and harmful consequences within Austin and far beyond. Here are the interventions we know about.

DIVESTMENTS & DISRUPTION PALESTINE SOLIDARITY DAY AND NIGHT

Beyond the already nauseating presence of military industry at the conference, the US military’s “Super Sponsoring” an “entertainment fair” while it abets ethnic cleansing in Palestine is infuriating and scandalous. Just days after the SmashBy call dropped, Austin For Palestine Coalition put out their own “War Profiteers Out of SXSW” call to action that included an email campaign and flyers for use in disruptions. In the week or two leading up to SouthBy, these calls quickly gained traction and thrust the Military presence into the spotlight. 100 artists cancelled their official showcases, and many others that didn’t went on to make statements of solidarity, sometimes in lieu of their performances. The military presence became the hotly contested issue of the week, and with so many participants in the war machine from across the state to corporate spectrum present, opportunities abounded for action. A relay of affinity group actions and mass gatherings seized these opportunities, storming high-traffic sites at SXSW to put pressure on this partnership.

A“SHUT DOWN SXSW” rally spearheaded by Austin’s Party for Socialism and Liberation took the downtown streets on opening night with numbers and energy. Despite making four gratuitously violent arrests, the cops failed to halt or disperse the march as it took 6th Street. The group rallied in front of the Capital Factory in the Omni Hotel, which hosted a wide range of military innovation events throughout the week. Out front, a group performed a version of “un violador en tu camino,”  a Chilean feminist protest performance adapted for the Palestinian liberation struggle by INCITE-Paliforce.

According to a national press release from INCITE, actions were carried out in Austin, Dallas, Denver, NYC, and San Francisco. A reportback from the Austin demonstration reads:

This year at SXSW the US Department of “Defense” is a super sponsor. Today, on International Women’s Day and 152 days into Israel’s latest genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza, we call out the militarization of SXSW and make clear that feminized bodies are never safe in the presence of state sponsored colonial and capitalist violence!

At the opening of the festival, we disrupt the warmongers and their infiltration of SXSW – the US military, Raytheon, BAE, Collins, the war contractors and the tech industries that support the surveillance, targeting, and murder – Amazon, Google, IBM, HP. We know that state violence and sexual violence are inextricably linked and that growing surveillance and the normalization of war will NOT keep us safe. As feminists of color in the belly of the beast, we must stop the US war machine.

If, later that weekend, you found yourself staring up at Tau Ceti, the Brazos St. mural depicting a transfixing spectrum of colors, you may have noticed fliers and cards billowing down from the sky. Or perhaps you were at the “Boundary Breakers” event by Collins Aerospace at Method Three and saw the flyers raining down while disruptors shouted from above. The flyers read “SXSW SUPPORTS GENOCIDE,” and called attention to Raytheon and other arms manufacturing companies holding court downtown. One brief statement from a crew, posted to the SmashBy socials, read:

SXSW has become a networking festival for genocidal actors to spread technologies of violence. Many who attend SXSW are unaware of its ties to the military and weapons manufacturers. As people who live in this city, we feel compelled to spread awareness that this festival comes at the cost of genocide.

These actions are no doubt how some passersby learned for the first time that Southby invites war profiteers to network and recruit in Austin. For others, these were a reminder that they aren’t alone in the disgust, disappointment, and rage. We can only hope a passing Raytheon employee slipped on and cracked their head on the curb.

Disruptions continued into the week. One group held a Ceasefire Now banner in front of the Paramount Theater, which hosted the SXSW Film Festival. We could not find a group that specifically claimed credit for it. A contingent from Jewish Voice for Peace weaved their way through the Creative Industries Expo and all the way to the US Army’s showroom stall with a banner reading “SXSW RUNS ON GENOCIDE.”

Military sponsorship of a music festival is a classic fascist move. Who would dare bring down the mood with tough questions when there are big acts to go see? How could empire be in decline if arts and entertainment are thriving? A sizeable demonstration (attend by close to sixty artists who pulled out of the festival) outside the Department of Defense stage struck to the heart of this exploitative tactic in a powerful show of solidarity.

Originally planning two separate rallies, the Austin for Palestine Coalition and the United Musicians and Allied Works joined forces to demand the festival both divest from all entities enabling genocide in Palestine as well as increase the paltry compensation musicians have tolerated from Southby for years. The message that the political, the economic, and the artistic are ever entwined was hard to ignore, attracting local media and drawing ire from Greg Abbott online, which in turn forced SXSW to acknowledge the controversy. Toothless and evasive as Southby’s statement on the matter was, their response nonetheless marks an unsightly crack in the neon illusion that they depend on to function.

ANDRE DICKENS SHUT DOWN

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens–under whose administration Cop City is still being built in the Weelaunee Forest, forest defenders have been charged as organized criminals, and police murdered demonstrator Tortuguita in cold blood–arrived at SXSW to speak on a panel concerning the struggles “progressive” Democratic mayors face in Republican-governed states.

No sooner did Dickens open his mouth than he was interrupted by someone in the crowd pointing out the hypocrisy of sitting on this panel while collaborating with Georgia governor Brian Kemp on Cop City. Dickens attempted to ignore and equivocate, but some ten more protesters rose from the seats in unison, shouting over him, calling to Stop Cop City and completely blocking the view of the stage with a banner. Having completely lost control of the event, conference staff escorted Dickens out into the hallway of the downtown Hilton, where a half dozen more protestors greeted them. Dickens and his entourage were chased down the hallway all the way to the stairs, the halls of the Hilton filled with chants of “Viva Viva Tortuguita,” “Free Jack” and “Stop Cop City.” While it was reported that the other three panelists returned for some abbreviated discussion, no one remained to sanitize Dickens’ ongoing deadly collusion with the cops and the state, and none of them mentioned their colleague who had been run from the building.

RALLY AGAINST SB4

In 2017, a bizarre contractual clause raised eyebrows among artists invited to perform at SXSW. Prohibited from playing any unofficial shows during their visit to Austin, it stated that any international musicians found in violation risked being reported to the “appropriate U.S. immigration authorities.” Not unlike its alliance with the military today, this was a mask-off moment for Southby, an entity far more concerned with control than culture.

It’s thus fitting that while the Homeland Security collaborationists put on their festival, friends and families from across Texas assembled in Austin to demand the repeal of SB4 and an end to Operation Lone Star. Hundreds marched from City Hall to the Capitol, where the event was punctuated by impressive performances from indigenous dancers and large-scale puppeteers. While we always encourage Austin protesters to break away from expected downtown targets like the Capitol, the movement to prevent local police from acting as border enforcers is only gaining momentum, with SB4 having been suspended in appellate court as of the time of writing.

LOVEBIRDS

On March 12th, one disruptive event transcended the dichotomy between shows & actions that defined much of the week. Flying under the radar as an “BIPOC/LGBTQIA Unofficial Showcase,” a SmashBy showcase took place at Lovebirds–a gentrifier bar on E. Cesar Chavez. Instead of the indie-pop atmosphere implied by the aesthetics of the flyer, the bar was taken over during happy hour by harsh noise and grindcore. A crowd of 50 punks & freaks milled around the spot, scaring away the typical patrons and SouthBy crowds passing by. The management, caught off guard by the show, was seen scrambling to assure potential customers that “it’s not always like this,” and to remove art from the walls for fear of its destruction.

https://austinautonomedia.noblogs.org/files/2024/04/lovebirds-chants.mp4

The crowd was overall tame, with only a small mosh pit forming early in the show. Some members of the audience found the bathroom too pristine for their appearance and redecorated with markers in order to fit the aesthetic quality of the grungier venues they are familiar with. Before the last set, the political message of the show was made clear as the crowd was led in chants of “Smash South By South West” “Black/Brown/Poor People Used to Live Here” and “Fire, Fire, Gentrifier!” A raucously good time was had by all at the expense of Lovebirds and its patrons.

SIDE SHOWS

Parallel to the circuit of DIY shows and activist-led protests, another world of conflictual activity was running wild through the week: the takeover crews.

This world of rowdy kids take over parking lots and streets with shows where they can show off their cars, do tricks like donuts & burnouts, and evade or fight the cops. The takeovers caused a huge uproar amongst politicians and liberals over a year ago when a particularly rowdy night took over the intersection of Barton Springs and chased off the cops who responded with fireworks and projectiles. Subsequently, even nominally progressive politicians came out demanding a harsher police crackdown. The State responded, with the legislature passing laws enabling the impounding of cars involved in takeovers, and collaborative investigation between DPS & APD leading to dozens of arrests and pre-emptive shutdowns of subsequent takeovers.

Despite the repression, the takeovers have continued with new crews and new accounts popping up to organize them. Takeovers took place Friday, Saturday, & Sunday night on both the first and second weekend of SmashBy, in locations ranging from industrial parks in North & Southeast Austin, to frontage roads out in Manor, to parking lots in front of department stores across the city. These takeovers didn’t reach the size and intensity of those from last February, and opted for evasion over confrontation with the police, cars scattering when cops arrived and regrouping at another announced location. Across the nights the takeovers stayed ahead of the police response, which seemed to be caught on the back foot and under-resourced to actually catch any substantial number of participants. We do not know of any arrests during either of these weekends of takeovers.

The takeovers are not political in the proper activist sense. They’re not part of an organization, they don’t make demands or have a stated ideology, and aren’t trying to recruit for some campaign. However, they are organized, have strategic intelligence, and are an expression of conflictual subcultures that challenge aspects of social order. The crews used the opportunity opened up by SXSW well, staying away from the city core and having their fun at a time when the police resources are already stretched to their limit. The movement of locations outmaneuvered the police’s ability to predict them, sometimes traveling back and forth across the city to scatter the police’s ability to coordinate a response. Taking over industrial parks, parking lots, and streets opened up unauthorized uses of public space, hacking the hostile urban architecture of cars & roads into a tool for agile action and joy.

Including the takeovers in this roundup isn’t an attempt to equate them with other activist endeavors or treat them as unproblematic exemplars of radicalism. But it recognizes that these side shows were expressions of a current of rebellious joy that made use of the opportunities presented in the week, living up to the invitation in the SmashBy call. Revolutionaries would do well to pay attention to these groups and consider what sorts of tactics could be circulated and links built across subcultures, without attempting to incorporate the takeovers into the world & logic of activism. Maybe, if they pay attention, more activists can learn from some of the strategic intelligence exhibited by these crews, particularly regarding the geography of power beyond the city center, and the possibilities enabled by highly mobile, dispersed action.

A SMASHING GOOD TIME: SHOWS, TEACH-INS, AND SKILLSHARES

Far from the belly of the beast, a parallel conference-festival brought communities across Austin together for music and learning. The SmashxSmashWest calendar was packed with performances by over 100 bands from near and far – as many as withdrew from SXSW to protest its military sponsorship. The menu of shows ranged from day parties by bookers like Howdy Gals to DIY punk shows and renegade raves. There were many evenings of SmashBy where one was confronted by having many options, sometimes conflicting, for what to go to, producing an unexpected sense of FOMO.

Seminars and workshops under the Smashby banner touched on topics ranging from queer youth liberation to gentrification and environmental racism to the restorative power of interpersonal conflict. Conversations around trans health autonomy, the autonomous hackerspace, and the healthy conflict workshop brought together new people to share conversations around their needs, desires, & capabilities. In the shadow of the spectacle that is SXSW, we can notice a slow growth of networks and skills coming out of SmashBy.

You can find resources from the trans health autonomy mixer & the conflict workshop in the SmashBy public Proton Drive.

On the first day of SmashBy, community members gathered at a potluck where they wrote 10 letters and raised $100 for Atlanta forest defender Jack Mazurek, who remains incarcerated following recent retaliation against Cop City activists. The local Weelaunee Defense Society chapter tabled at SmashBy events through the week and raised $500 for the Tucson Anti-Repression Committee to support activists arrested during the recent Nationwide Summit Against Cop City in Tucson. A show at Four Fountains hosted screenings and materials from ATX Barrio Archive, a community archive highlighting the histories of life & resistance among working class Black & Brown East Austinites. Falasteen Street Museum took over City Hall Plaza for the week with art, panels on the history of Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonization, film screenings, performances by artists (many of whom had dropped their SXSW showcases), and more.

At the end of the week, A benefit event at Monkeywrench Books raised over $400 to support two antifascists from North Texas, Chris G. and Aeshna. The two were arrested during an action defending a drag show from a protest by the christo-fascist New Columbia Movement; at the action, the police rampaged and targetted antifascists. Since then, the pair have faced constant stonewalling by the prosecutors, harassment by federal investigators, and a lawsuit by the New Columbia Movement. These moves are clear attempts to intimidating resistance to fascism & queer exterminationism, with movements by the State & extra-state fascist actors going hand in hand. A statement from Chris was read out to the crowd, which invokes a spirit of hope and connects it to struggles from Weelaunee to Gaza.

CONCLUSION: CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

Shortly before the week started, we at Austin Autonomedia launched our own challenge & bingo sheet. A surprising amount was crossed off the list. Many of the challenges offered were not met, but other limits we didn’t mention were pushed through. So how did the first SmashBy stack up? What were the missed opportunities, limits, & challenges? What is possible now, and what new horizons could be opened up for next year?

Few of our friends, and even fewer of our enemies, could have expected SmashXSmashWest to pop off the way it did this year, with only 3 weeks between the launching of the call and the start of SXSW. It appears the SmashBy call truly found its moment, and hit on a current of antagonism to SXSW which, combined with the hostility to the US Army and Palestine solidarity activity, was bound to explode. More people broke out of the tired roles of Instagram spectator-commentator or body in a crowd in an inspiring show of autonomous, self-organized activity.

SmashBy’s strength was its ability to spread mimetically, with little coordination or infrastructure needed as it spread through social media and found people to answer its call. This mimetic strategy was limited in effect. While it could circulate ideas & proposals, it could not provide the infrastructure, coordination, or initiative for people to act on them. Planning for actions beyond the city core would likely require some fore-thought and a group dedicated to carrying it out. Deeper connections and collaborations could push the limits of both the art and protest scenes. More coordination could bring in new groups & spaces into the week of action. The kind of infrastructure that could support organizers from across the country to come for SmashBy would require even higher levels of coordination and planning.

All of these things must happen in the realm of direct connections & relationships, not through Instagram story. Such mediums are limited in what they can give us, and are always fragile. We know that SXSW threatened Austin for Palestine Coalition and reported a SmashBy post for trademark infringement; had the SmashBy Instagram been suspended, it would have cut off the means to communicate information about the week. To increase the resilience and capacities of the networks that are forming, we must find ways to communicate to each other directly, build our networks rather than our follower counts, and not be reliant on hostile social media infrastructure.  [To that end, you can follow Austin Autonomedia’s mailing list here]

The call to action was effective because it spoke to both the political and art scenes. The art & music scene was especially receptive to the call to autonomous activity, which resonated with a pervasive DIY ethos. These SmashBy showcases provided a social base for the week, filling it out with a host of events that spread the message of SmashBy and offered opportunities for political milieus to circulate ideas and connections. The political milieus followed suit with their own lineup of disruptions and activities, and maintained a presence at the showcases through things like tabling and speaking.

This cross-pollination was limited though, as it does not appear that many of the people organizing or going to art & music events joined actions or political workshops. Part of this was a reflection of a separation of spaces–a wide range of showcases venues compared to Monkeywrench Books as the hub for most workshops/trainings. While SmashBy pushed the art world to sharpen its political edge, it has not yet answered our challenge to “break down the divide between art & action.” Perhaps next year we can see these barriers break down, with trainings & workshops hosted in the same venue or in conjunction with a show, or a renegade show turned into a disruptive action.

The week of SmashBy also pushed the political milieus in new directions. Groups like the Austin for Palestine Coalition, which up to this point had largely led the sort of pacified rallies criticized in other posts on our site, began to cut its teeth in more confrontational, disruptive, and decentralized activity. While we normally maintain the position that Downtown is a trap for activism–symbolic, empty, and hyper-policed–SXSW proved to be an exception. For that week, Downtown was actually filled with enemies, and so actions targeted at SXSW had material stakes and the ability to disrupt the networking & innovation, to strike at the brain of Empire. Additionally, successful disruptions of SXSW events are likely liabilities for the festival as well, as it calls into question their preparedness and reliability.

The risk of prioritizing actions targeting SXSW is that it locks activists & militants into a symmetrical, head-on conflict with our enemies. Such conflicts are advantageous for oue enemies, who have greater resources and force to throw at us in such confrontations. However, it seems that many of the actions achieved success by avoiding direct, pre-announced confrontation. Dispersed actions which were not announced publicly gave activists the fluidity, speed, and secrecy to outmaneuver the stretched-thin security at SXSW, exploiting their weakpoints. Some of these, such as the disruption of Andre Dickens and the INCITE-Paliforce, were able to muster relatively large numbers despite not being advertised publicly. By contrast, the anti-SXSW rally at the beginning of the week was pre-announced and therefore confronted a more prepared, concentrated, aggressive security response.

While the range of actions was inspiring, this year’s SmashBy saw little activity beyond the city core, with the takeovers being the notable exception. Despite the attention brought on to SXSW for hosting the US Army and military contractors like BAE Systems, few looked beyond the conference itself to notice the many recruitment centers scattered across the city or the BAE Systems facility in North Austin. Perhaps next year, with more preparation and information, the locus of action can move out of downtown. Such a week of action would be truly decentralized and be even harder to police and govern; a week where the cops are stretched thin trying to simultaneously protect the conference and move around the city to stop actions.

Try as they might to sidestep or roll their eyes at demands for justice at SXSW, we doubt anyone from the expense account schmoozers to the dilettante grinders to even the festival organizers could ignore the malaise and ambivalence that permeated the festival this year. While the exploitative and elitist power that SouthBy visits on Austin each year is hardly new, growing disillusionment from locals and travelers surged this year into new, powerful shapes of resistance. Only time will tell how this antagonism will re-emerge next year, but we don’t have to wait – while SmashXSmashWest hibernates, we can build on the relationships and lessons we took away from this week to smash all year ‘round.

Welcome back fellow antifascists!

As always, we have a lot to cover in this column, especially some exciting action reports and important calls for solidarity with antifascists in trouble. With lots to talk about, let’s dive right in!

News

Memorial for Sean Kealiher in Portland, OR

The man that was arrested and sentenced to 17 years in prison for the murder of Portland, OR based anarchist and antifascist activist Sean Kealiher “was also linked to a 2003 rape allegation” through “sperm cells recovered in a 2003 rape kit.” Kealiher was murdered in 2019, but his killer was not arrested until 2022 – only after he was outed by Kealiher’s mother, local antifascist groups, and journalists through a popular podcast series. Many contend that local police “slow-walked” the investigation into Kealiher’s death due to his anarchist politics – only acting after continued public outcry and the outing of his killer by local activists and journalists.

Recall campaigns against far-Right and white supremacist elected officials received mixed results across the US. In Shasta County, California, a recall campaign to remove a far-Right, election conspiracy theorist failed by only a few dozen votes, while a recall effort to remove “Judson Blevins…the Oklahoma state coordinator of the white nationalist organization Identity Evropa and a participant in the deadly Unite the Right rally” from a seat on the city’s commission board in Enid, Oklahoma was successful.

The neo-Nazi group Patriot Front continues to be in hot water, with members of the group currently facing charges for vandalizing a mural in Richmond, Virginia and the neo-Nazi organization’s leader, Thomas Ryan Rousseau, headed to court over his involvement in the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, VA.

Followers of the neo-Nazi livestreamer Nick Fuentes continue to make inroads into the Republican party establishment. According to the AZ Mirror:

Kari Lake grinned widely and flashed a thumbs up as she posed for a photo Sunday with a far-right political operative who is reportedly a fervent follower and close associate of white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

A few days before the event for campaign volunteers, Wade Searle, who worked as the digital director for U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar until shortly after he was unmasked as one the “strongest soldiers” for white nationalist leader Nick Fuentes, was standing almost directly behind Lake at a press conference where Wyoming U.S. Sen. John Barrasso endorsed her. It’s unclear if Searle is working for Lake or what ties he has to her campaign for U.S. Senate.

Searle was outed by Talking Points Memo in May 2023 as a prominent member of the “groyper” movement, the name for a collection of young white nationalists who use online trolling tactics and aim to normalize extreme and racist views by aligning them with Christianity and so-called “traditional” values.

Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and Hitler-loving racist, is largely seen as the leader of the groyper movement, which has a strong presence in Arizona. When Searle was working with Gosar, the congressman often posted memes steeped in white nationalist and neo-Nazi subculture. Searle was also not the only staffer in Gosar’s office with similar views. The Lake campaign did not respond to requests for comment on what role, if any, Searle has within the Lake campaign. Attempts to contact Searle, who has recently been marketing himself as a consultant for conservative political campaigns, were unsuccessful.

More outlets are reporting on the authoritarian push behind Project 2025. As The New Republic reported:

[Project 2025] has powerhouse backing. The Koch network and other dark-money donors are generously funding it. The corporation-underwritten American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has supplied “model legislation” and training to Republican state legislators. Endorsers include Mark Meadows, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Sean Hannity, and many more. Convention of States Action (COS), the 501c(4) organization leading the campaign, whose head was a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, has recruited and deployed volunteers to lobby their legislatures. (It also offers training in “biblical citizenship.”) COS has held three practice conventions with legislators from nearly every state. The Heritage Foundation—the 800-pound gorilla on the right—recently signed on in “a game-changing report” that such a convention would be “a potent check on federal power” and is “a worthy cause.” That endorsement is likely to drive even more cash to add to the over $70 million in IRS-traceable contributions that groups solely focused on convening such a gathering have garnered from 2012 to 2022, in findings of the Center for Media and Democracy. That figure does not include contributions to ALEC, which has promoted the convention since 2013; its revenue hovers around $10 million annually.

Promoters have been methodically lining up authorizations from the states since the 2012 election showed them that most Americans reject the kind of society they seek, even Mitt Romney’s mild version. So strategists concluded that the only way to permanently entrench minority rule by plutocrats and theocrats is to encase it in a dramatically altered Constitution.

Media Matters also writes:

The initiative is backed by a coalition of over 100 organizations and individuals, at least two-thirds of which receive funding from the Koch network or conservative philanthropist Leonard Leo. The project is also heavily promoted by MAGA-connected media figures such as Steve Bannon, who has called it the “blueprint” for Trump’s second term on his War Room podcast.

Finally, Talking Points Memo has a new exposé out about the secretive group, the Society for American Civic Renewal, Hatewatch has published a piece on former contributor to Liberty Hangout, TJ Roberts, who is currently “a candidate for [the] Kentucky’s House of Representatives in District 66,” and USA Today has an investigation into Denise Aguilar, a Proud Boys associate, anti-LGBTQ+ bigot, and January 6th participant, currently running for office in California.

Research Roundup

Hans Graebener, the white supremacist behind “StoneToss” and “Red Panels”

In some really big news, two huge names in white nationalism were outed by antifascist researchers. Anonymous Comrades Collective released a doxx of Hans Kristian Graebener of Spring, TX, the white supremacist comic artist behind StoneToss and Red Panels. Vishal Sighn at Daily Kos also reported on the logs from the StoneToss Telegram channel. News of Graebener’s doxxing went viral on social media, but fascists and white supremacists quickly called on Elon Musk to remove the offending information from Twitter/X. As Wired reported:

X has locked and suspended the accounts of journalists and researchers who shared the alleged identity of a neo-Nazi cartoonist known as Stonetoss after the cartoonist appealed to site owner Elon Musk. The incident, critics say, highlights once again how Musk has not only welcomed extremists onto his platform but has repeatedly boosted their conspiracies, engaged with their accounts, and seems to have protected them from scrutiny.

A lengthy X thread posted by the antifascist research group Anonymous Comrades Collective last week claimed that Stonetoss is a man named Hans Kristian Graebener from Spring, Texas. Stonetoss cartoons, which feature simple and colorful imagery coupled with racist, homophobic, and antisemitic language, have become hugely popular among right-wing communities since they were first published at least seven years ago.

The Anonymous Comrade Collective thread got a lot of attention on X, racking up at least 13.5 million views. On Thursday, the Stonetoss account appealed to X users who have “a direct line” to Musk, X’s owner, to help to get the thread deleted. Musk has, in the past, shared an altered version of a Stonetoss cartoon about the collapse of society. “If Elon’s idea of a ‘free speech’ website is one where people can be intimidated into silence, the outcome will be a site where the Stasi will drive out all dissent,” Stonetoss wrote. The account also tagged Musk and offered to share a list of people to target.

Hours later, the account associated with the Anonymous Comrades Collective that posted the thread was deleted, and the account was suspended. On Friday, dozens of users, including a number of researchers and journalists, began discussing the incident and posting some of the details of the research, including Graebener’s name.

X locked down many of these accounts and ordered them to delete the offending tweet to get full access to their accounts back. Among those targeted were Jared Holt, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who covers right-wing extremism; Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at Southern Poverty Law Center; and Steven Monacelli, an investigative journalist for the Texas Observer. (WIRED has also published Monacelli’s work.) X also imposed a ban on sharing the link to the Anonymous Comrades Collective blog detailing its research.

…[A]ccounts like Libs of TikTok and far-right troll Andy Ngo, both of which have shared private information about trans people but have not had their accounts suspended. Musk has also engaged with posts that doxed individuals on X, with seemingly no recourse for those accounts.

The same collective also dropped an exposé on “JazzHands McFeels,” the podcast host of Fash the Nation:

One of the most prominent neo-Nazi internet personalities influencing the recent rise of online (and, hence, offline) fascism in the United States was a podcast host who used the alias “Jazzhands McFeels” on his podcast Fash the Nation. Through this medium, Jazzhands McFeels promoted fascist ideals like racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and LGBTQ+ bigotry under the guise of “sophisticated” political analysis. The podcast became widely known in extreme-right circles and Jazzhands McFeels became one of the top e-celebs to ever host a neo-Nazi podcast.

We investigated Robert Warren Gasiewicz who, by this point, matched numerous data selectors we had for Jazzhands: appearances at two specific events, proximity to Washington, D.C., a Polish surname and an association with Republican political campaigns.

Robert “Jazzhands” Gasiewicz, besides hosting a neo-Nazi podcast for many years and writing far too many white nationalist articles on the internet, was also a very active participant in National Justice Party live-action events. In fact, as “Jazzhands McFeels,” Gasiewicz has spoken and written about a number of in-person events he has attended. During the 2022 Labor Day weekend he wrote about the “8th National Justice Party meeting,” and on February 23, 2023 published a podcast  about his attendance at the NJP winter meeting in Orlando.

For all the white nationalist talk of “anti-white” victimization, Robert Warren Gasiewicz seems to have done rather well for himself. Insider leaks showed that Jazzhands had been receiving at least $120,000 per year from the now struggling The Right Stuff network. But TRS was clearly just a small part of Jazzhands’ income. Gasiewicz regularly vacations in Europe and recently landed an $850,000 home in a posh gated community. Together with his fully-loaded Ford F-150 truck, a Porsche, various boats and a $700 espresso machine, it seems that Gasiewicz has somehow managed to make fascist propaganda profitable.

In California, antifascists exposed “Jonathan James Giusto Sr., a violent and cowardly Proud Boy, white nationalist, and part-time neo-nazi supporter from Antelope, CA. Within the Proud Boys, Giusto serves as president of the “Cap City” splinter of the Sacramento Proud Boys chapter.” Antifascists also posted a hard look at “Oakland Turning Point USA President Cheyenne Kenney, daughter of local “hate rock” band leaders and Proud Boy Associates Travis and Liza Kenney, running for State Assembly.”

Jonathan Giusto, circa late 2023

Journalists in Texas outed “Rhett Murry Loftis, a 23-year-old resident of Weatherford, [who] admits he leads the Parker County Active Club,” a network of neo-Nazi groups. Also in Texas, Late Night Antifascists exposed “software engineer, Patriot Front associate, and Unite the Right attendee Andrew Mark Liebenow (32) aka “Eurogenicist” of Austin and Round Rock, Texas,” and “neo-Nazi and Patriot Front associate Jordan Thomas Fracht (35) aka “Mooch TX” of Houston and Beaumont, Texas…”

Anonymous Comrades Collective released info on “Carson Ford Brooks, aka “Carson Kilgrey” and his wife Bonnie Marie Carroll, aka “Marion Kilgrey,” neo-Nazis involved in the now imploded “National Justice Party.”

“American Banderite Network (ABN) – a teenage nazi branding effort built around pro-Ukraine white nationalism.”

Raw Story published an investigative piece on the 2119 Crew, a group of neo-Nazi youth. Antifascists with the Stumptown Research Collective also released their research into the “American Banderite Network (ABN), a pro-Ukraine white nationalist channel on the messaging app Telegram.” From their deep dive article:

This article exposes two of the founders of the American Banderite Network (ABN), a neo-Nazi political project, as a pair of 16-year-old twins who are currently juniors at Century High School in Hillsboro, OR. As they are minors, we will only be identifying them by their initials: AP and BP. However, if they continue to engage in neo-Nazi organizing, their full names and unredacted faces will be released. And to any adults who consider organizing with these kids in the future, know that if you do we will put you on blast.

In Pennsylvania, One People’s Project reports:

Area residents and allies helped in identifying a local business owner as the person caught stickering White Lives Matter propaganda in this municipality’s multi-ethnic downtown a month ago.

The neighborhood organization UDTJ reported on its social media accounts that they were able to identify David Miller who has a business, Upper Darby Auto Detailing at 25 Powell Lane, roughly a 5 – 10 minute walk from where he was caught and filmed propagandizing on the opposite side of the street from the 69th Street Transportation Center.

In Central Oregon, antifascists released a doxx on “Haeden [Hockersmith]…a Utah based member of Patriot Front who uses the alias “Max UT” in the leaked rocket chats. According to online sources, Hockersmith attended Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, where he was listed as a member of the schools track and field team during the 2019-2020 season.”

On social media, Appalachia Research Club has a deep dive on “Sean Kauffmann of the Tennessee Active Club,” who “faces up to 12 years in prison for felony child abuse and aggravated assault.” Nothing like that family, faith, and folk – right!

Finally, Left Coast Right Watch has a new report up on “Mohammed Wadaa, the Marine identified last year as a cofounder of the neo-Nazi “Clockwork Crew,” [who] is out of the brig at Camp Pendleton and is spending his free time trying to make money in prize fights.”

Action

In February, members of the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe held an unannounced march in Nashville, TN. Local news reports that they were confronted and heckled by members of the public, leading the group to pile into a “U-Haul box truck that ultimately exited greater Nashville..”

The International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund reports on the recent campaign to support several SHARPs in Columbia:

…[S]ix members of SHARP (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) Bogotá…found themselves outnumbered by knife-wielding neo-Nazis at a concert earlier this year. And not just any neo-nazis – these particular boneheads were from the CRN Radical Nationalist Commando (formerly Tercera Fuerza) – a far-right extremist terror outfit with connections in police, military, and political circles.

Despite the odds being against them and facing well-armed opponents, our SHARP friends managed to effectively defend themselves, sustaining no serious injuries while at least one of the fascist boneheads went home in an ambulance. Now our six friends find themselves fighting an opponent just as vicious as the nazis – the Colombian police and so-called criminal justic system!

That kind of battle takes resources beyond the means of your average anti-racist skinhead in Bogotá, so a call went out internationally to back them up. The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund responded, as did dozens of others from around the world (according to their crowdfunder). Shortly after, the Bogotá crew reached out to us, saying “We thank those that helped and were concerned with the situation. Long live Antifascist skinheads! Long live SHARP!” We hope our friends come out of their fight in the courts as decisively as they did their fight in the concert hall!

In Pittsburgh, people held a demonstration outside of a church known for harassing patients at local abortion clinics. Also in Pittsburgh, pro-LGBTQ+ demonstrators rallied against several Turning Point USA speakers, including Candace Owens.

Community members rally to defend a drag even against anti-trans Christian fascists in Austin, TX.

In Austin, Texas, community members and antifascist organizations rallied against a small group of far-Right gender fascists who protested against a drag event. Candice Bernd of Truthout wrote on Instagram:

[People] defended Dragtivity Day from a group of six far-Right protesters affiliated with self-avowed Christian fascist Kelly Neidert and her rebranded “Texas Coalition for Kids” group, as well as the so-called “Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property” on Saturday. Dragtivity Day…features a drag story time, face-painting and other activities that encourage civic participation and promote literacy.

To my knowledge this is the first time Neidert, who is also a member of the Christofascist group New Columbia Movement’s Women’s League, has ever shown up directly in Austin. NCM threatened a show at Little Darlin’s in 2022, which resulted in a cancellation.

Far-Right instigator Kevin Whitt was among those who joined the far-Right entourage. I witnessed Whitt calling Queer folks at Cheer Up’s the F-slur and others making extremely bigoted remarks, asking Queer Drag Defenders whether they “have had their Monkeypox vaccinations,” etc — all of this in front of the very children they claim to be “protecting.” I watched Whitt remove a sticker declaring the area a “fascist free zone” from the light post they were standing under. Very telling.

This isn’t about protecting children. It’s bigotry, plain and simple. We can’t let attacks in the Queer community in Austin stand.

In Rocklin, California, antifascists mobilized in solidarity with a local church targeted by the Proud Boys, after the church drew the attention of the far-Right for hosting a fundraising event that featured drag as part of the program. From a report-back posted to It’s Going Down:

Despite the overall disorganization and lack of vigor from the Proud Boys, tensions were high early on. Robert Sunday Jr–a Proud Boy who had previously been caught on film punching a Trans teenager in Sacramento – stole a defender’s sign and threw it on the ground. The defenders held their ground while others guarded each of the front doorways, ensuring only genuine attendees could enter. After a while of stand-off outside the front doors, The Proud Boys eventually seemed to realize that they would not be able to disrupt or shut down the event from happening, and they gathered up and left. Defenders continued to guard the doorways, watching the parking lots and escorting folks to their vehicles until the event ended and the last attendees had left.

Despite the attempts of the Proud Boys, the event itself was a success and received great feedback of not only the event itself but the folks who helped keep it safe. Community supporters made up of anti-fascists, helpful volunteers, and local residents held a united front in the face of fascist violence showing once again the power of an organized community.

Satirical flyer from @Off_the_99

On March 21st in Memphis, Tennessee, a Turning Point USA speaking event featuring Kyle Rittenhouse was “derailed” by hundreds of “outraged students,” who organized a mass protest, walkout, and finally chased Rittenhouse off campus.

Students rallied outside of the event, which was billed by TPUSA as a talk on the 2nd amendment and the “lies” of Black Live Matter. A walkout from inside the speaking event was also organized, leaving only a small amount of people inside with Rittenhouse, who did not give a speech, but instead conducted a Q and A.

The official speaking event came to an abrupt end when an African-American student asked Rittenhouse to comment on recent racist claims made by TPUSA CEO Charlie Kirk. The student stated to Rittenhouse:

He says that we shouldn’t celebrate Juneteenth, we shouldn’t celebrate Martin Luther King Day—we should be working those days. He called Ketanji Brown Jackson an affirmative action hire, he said all this nonsense about George Floyd, and he said he’d be scared if a Black pilot was on a plane. Does that not seem racist?

Rittenhouse refused to comment and stormed off, grabbing his dog which sat by him on the stage. In a later interview, Rittenhouse claimed that he had in fact a “hard cut off time,” but it was clear he was shut down and defeated and did not know how to react to Kirk’s clear racism. Following the end of the talk, Ritenhouse and his entourage quickly left the building with a large police escort in tow. At this point, the large crowd of protesters swarmed Rittenhouse, chanting and following the group as it hurriedly made its way to a parking garage and then quickly exited the campus.

Photo via: @tamisawyer

Flyers passed out by Turning Point USA reading, “9mm Beats 911 Every Time,” celebrated extra-judicial murder and violence, which has long been been championed by the far-Right; from George Zimmerman signing packs of Skittles, Proud Boys selling Pinochet t-shirts, to support for the killers of Ahmaud Arbery.

This celebration of fascist murder has even become state official policy. In the wake of Rittenhouse’s multiple killings, the Department of Homeland Secruity (DHS) under Trump directed officials to support the violence. As VICE reported:

Department of Homeland Security officials were given a list of sympathetic talking points to use when answering questions about the teenager who allegedly killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, according to an internal memo obtained by NBC News.

This took place against a backdrop of extreme politicization within the DHS under Chad Wolf, according to whistleblowers, who instructed those working at the agency to downplay threats from the far-Right and play up the threat of anarchists and antifascists.

Rittenhouse was thrust into the spotlight in late August of 2020, after he shot and killed two people and seriously injured another during a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin following riots that erupted after the brutal police shooting of Jacob Blake, who was left paralyzed. As the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote, “Rittenhouse…traveled to the scene of the chaos…among a contingent of militia members,” who were galvanized to drive hours across state lines after the spread of far-Right conspiracy theories about the protests. After the shootings, Rittenhouse was acquitted at trial in 2021.

Hundreds of students at the University of Memphis rush to confront Kyle Rittenhouse.

Rittenhouse has a long history of associations with white supremacists and those on the far-Right. He was photographed on the streets of Kenosha alongside Ryan Balch, who was “immersed in white supremacist propaganda” and the far-Right Boogaloo movement online. Since the killings, Rittenhouse has also been photographed making the Alt-Right “OK” hand sign with Proud Boys, speaking alongside figures such as Jack Posobiec at Turning Point USA events, and in 2023 “a Texas Tribune reporter and photographer observed [neo-Nazi Nick] Fuentes and…Kyle Rittenhouse” attending a meeting hosted by “Jonathan Stickland, the ultraconservative leader of a group that has donated millions of dollars to high-profile Texas leaders.”

Sign held by students in Kentucky at protest against Kyle Rittenhouse.

Resistance to Rittenhouse continued in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where hundreds of students organized a sit-in, a march, and a disruption of Rittenhouse’s speech at Western Kentucky University. As Yahoo News reported:

[Protesters] marched through campus after the sit-in, drawing in more protesters, and eventually stopped in front of the venue ahead of the ticketed event. They were joined by a separate protest from the Bowling Green Freedom Walkers — the College Heights Herald, WKU’s student newspaper, reported WKU Police estimated the crowd reached 700 people at its peak.

Posts on social media report that Rittenhouse spoke for only 20 minutes before walking off stage as demonstrators erupted into chants of “No justice, no peace!”

In Sacramento, students and community members rallied and protested against Paula Scanlan, an anti-LGBTQ+ Turning Point USA speaker on campus.

In Montreal, hundreds also took to the streets to denounce transphobia and the so-called “Committee of the Wise.”

In the streets of Montreal. Photo: @nous_pas_sages on Instagram

Solidarity and Support

In Texas, two organizers are facing charges and expensive legal costs for standing up to gender fascists in defense of their communities. Both Aeshna and Chris are calling for support. Here is a statement, originally posted to Austin Autonomedia, from Chris, delivered at a recent benefit show in Austin, Texas as part of the Smash By Smash West counter-summit:

I did not ask for this.

It feels strange and unkind to center myself in such a way when the world is on fire, I never desired or hoped to be the center of anything in this world of so much loss and heartache greater than mine but again,

I did not ask for this.

I hope that you will hear my story as a message of hope in the ruins of what once was and join me in dreaming of what will be. No matter what the bastards say, they are scared. They would not have taken me if they weren’t. They know the micro-chasms in their stranglehold on us are widening everyday. They shudder knowing that as long as there is breath in our lungs this blueprint of oppression as we witness it from Fort Worth to the Weelaunee to Gaza will not stand. My heart aches for my partner and for my children in this hellish limbo of uncertainty but your collective love gives me strength in ways I cant fully comprehend, much less articulate.

Empathy dies quickly in this world, and it is not our fault but the fault of our social conditioning that we’ve designed to pulse these little doses of relief as each crisis hits; even our prisoners and martyrs become becons of idoltry we thingify and consume. I ask that as you go from here you remember our names and what we represent because it could and can be any one of your names the suits scoop next. Envelop your chosen kin in hope and carry yourself with the confidence that no matter the stumbles of the journey, the path to progress has never been more clearly defined but through our radical love for one another and because of y’all I feel that love.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

In San Deigo, antifascists are facing charges for standing up to a violent group of Proud Boys and American Guard members and are calling for support. For background on the case, check out an interview with Jermey White on It’s Going Down who you can support here, and be sure to support Tall Can who is currently behind bars.

Brian DiPippa, a activist in Pittsburgh that is facing charges stemming from a protest against a gender fascist speaker, has been locked up for almost a year. Please consider writing a letter and helping support here.

Butler County Prison
c/o Brian DiPippa
#42322 PO Box 9156
Seminole, FL 33775-9156

Note: All mail to Butler County Prison must first be sent to Florida where it will be scanned and then sent to prisoners electronically.

Call to Action

Antifascists in the Pacific Northwest are calling for help in opposing the neo-Nazi Wolfpack network. Antifascists in Corvallis, Oregon have a deep dive on the group which you can read here. From the article:

The [Pacific Northwest Wolfpack] has existed since 2016, but recently has expanded its organizing and is constructing a white separatist compound in rural Washington state, just outside of Elma. Several of their members, including those in leadership positions, are dangerous and have been responsible for many acts of violence, including a recent double homicide in King County.

As an organization, they are closely affiliated with other Odinist hate groups, and have strong ties to bonehead prison gangs and the greater “3.0″ movement. Most concerning, they incorporate children into the majority of their practices; a main goal of their organization is to groom children into a lifetime of white supremacy. PNWWP and its members pose a drastic threat to their local communities and the Pacific Northwest as a whole, and need to be regarded as such.

The group goes on to write about how the wider community can help in opposing this violent neo-Nazi group. In a call to action they write:

We are making a public call to action to disrupt the organizing of the Pacific Northwest Wolfpack. PNWWP is a neo-Nazi organization operating in Western Washington with ties to extremely violent groups like the Hammerskins, American Front, and Northwest Nationalist Network. The group is tied to multiple murders, and one member is currently on trial for a double homicide and the slaying of a horse. Our full article on the group that exposes over a dozen of their members and associates is available at cvantifa.noblogs.org/freyrshof

Pacific Northwest Wolfpack is in the process of building a compound in Elma Washington called Freyrshof. This is concerning because it has the possibility to become a major regional nexus for neo-Nazi organizing a-la the Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake, Idaho. We are making this call to action for Antifascists across the region to join us in stopping construction of this hof through disruption of the group’s ability to make money.

We ask anyone who reaches out to any individuals or companies in service of this call to engage with utmost politeness and professionalism. We have absolutely no reason to believe that any people adjacent to individuals involved in PNWWP know about their associates Nazism, and we don’t want to any of them to be harassed or threatened. The following are some quick and easy ways you can assist us in disrupting the organizing of PNWWP and shut down fascism in the PNW!

For more information and action items, go here to read more.

On Monday, April 9th, Cops of Campus in Davis, California reported that a dining hall on the University of California Davis campus was occupied and opened to the public. Banners hung in front of the dining hall read: “Cops off Campus, IDF Out of Palestine” and “Free Food, Free Palestine.”

This is just the latest dining hall occupation that has taken place on campus, where according to a 2018 study, nearly half of the student body faces food insecurity, a number which has surely only risen in the aftermath of the pandemic, rising rents, and growing inflation.

Graffiti reading, “Gary is a War Profiteer” on UC Davis campus. SOURCE: Cops of Campus

According to The Aggie, “In 2015, Chancellor Gary May received $288,280 for serving on the [board of] Leidos,” a weapons firm that has been denounced for profiting off of war crimes in Palestine.

A statement in flyer form that was distributed on campus at the occupied dining hall read:

We are here today in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation, under the simple banner FOOD NOT GENOCIDE. It is the six month anniversary of Al-Aqsa Flood. On that day something began, and nothing. Nothing in the sense that the Zionist entity has occupied Palestine — delivering apartheid, murder, and starvation by practice and policy — for three- quarters of a century. Something in the sense that, confronted with the genocidal campaign that has followed, a genocide broadly recognized in the international community and courts, global support for the Zionist entity has finally collapsed — even among the people of its staunchest allies. Now there is only brute force to preserve Zionist desires and dominion.

The program of genocide has among its most horrific features an intensification of the long-standing and well-documented state policy enforcing starvation on the people of Gaza. Millions are right now being driven into deadly famine. This program includes among other things the blocking of basic survival aid by both military and civilian genocidaires; the destruction of food; the targeted murder of aid workers; military and political attacks on aid organizations; and deadly military assaults on starving people trying to access aid. History will need to be long indeed to deliver anything more vile than the Flour Massacre. Every Zionist wears its shame from head to toe.

Today as every day we recognize the courageous struggle of Palestinians for survival and liberty. At this distance we are aware that our support can only be modest and incomplete. We do what we can, where we can, when we can. In assuring that a meal today is free and accessible to all who visit, we reiterate our solidarity with the Palestinian struggle specifically against the weapon of starvation wielded by the bloodthirsty and illegitimate Zionist entity. We remind everyone with us today that “the colonial world is a world divided into compartments” — that a world with checkpoints controlling who does and does not get food is “a world cut in two.” We stand on the side of food for all, on the side of the oppressed, and against a world cut in two: PALESTINE WILL BE FREE

Follow Cops off Campus in Davis here for more updates and photos.

Long-running anarchist radio and podcast show The Final Straw speaks to an outside supporter about the unfolding situation at the Rockview prison in central Pennsylvania.

SCI Rockview is a prison in central Pennsylvania where incarcerated comrades have been facing repression for demanding justice in the face of impunity by racist COs and following a year of prisoner deaths due to institutional toxicity and guard violence. We speak to an outside supporter about the situation at Rockview, the reactions of administration, inside / outside relationships and solidarity that have flared up. We hope that this conversation contributes to increased and thickened ties between folks on both sides of the walls.

You can read some recent posts about this situation at AbolitionistStudy.com and PHLAntiCap.NoBlogs.org and you can find audio from the wives of prisoners at SCI Rockview on In The Mix Prisoner Podcast. A few other sites of interest include StudyAndStruggle.com, DC IWOC on instagram, and In The Belly Journal.

This conversation was conducted via encrypted messages and recorded by a comrade Golem and Ash from the the MolotovNow! Podcast, so a big thanks is due to them.

• Transcript
• PDF (Unimposed)
• Zine (Imposed PDF)

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR on Unsplash