First up, former co-host on the show Scott talks about the upcoming Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair happening the weekend of August 11 – 13th, some of the content and notes on access, as well as mentioning some new projects their involved with. You can learn more about the bookfair by visiting ACABookfair.noblogs.org , the project’s instagram, facebook or mastodon.
Then, Fern from the International Anarchist Defense Fund (AFund.Info) talks about the upcoming International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners from August 23-30th, taking place wherever you make it happen. You can find the call-out, materials, supported prisoners, some anti-repression groups involved and info on past actions and events at https://Solidarity.International .
Announcement
Black Anarchist Hybachi Lamar Support
Hybachi Lamar, an incarcerated Black, Kemetic anarchist being held at the Cook County Jail talks about the conditions in the jail in an audio message that is shared alongside links to his writings and info on how to help South Chicago Anarchist Black Cross support him. All of this can be found at https://southchicagoabc.org/helpcompa/
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Featured Track:
Everything In Its Right Place (by Radiohead) by The String Quartet from Strung Out On Kid A – The String Quartet Tribute To Radiohead
First up, Ian interviews Josh MacPhee and Alec Dunn, co-editors of Signal, about the recently published eighth volume of the Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. They discuss their motivations and experiences producing Signal for over a decade, designing print media in the digital age, and their work as part of Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, long-running, geographically dispersed artist collective dedicated to the production of radical art for grassroots movements. [ 00:05:33 – 00:44:37]
Mwalimu Shakur on Abolition, Organizing and Education
Then, you’ll hear most of a conversation with imprisoned New Afrikan revolutionary socialist, Mwalimu Shakur currently incarcerated in Corcoran Prison in CA, about abolition, political education and the hunger strikes of 2013 in which he participated. [00:45:14 – 01:12:37]
Join Blue Ridge ABC on the first Sunday of each month, next up being August 6th from 3-5pm at the NEW Firestorm spot at 1022 Haywood Road, in West Asheville. And swing by our table at the ACABookfair August 12-13 at Different Wrld to get involved, get a poster for the upcoming International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners and check out the other awesome stuff.
ACABookfair
If you’re nearby, consider a visit to the 3 days of event around the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair in Asheville from August 11-13 with tons of speakers, publishers, music and more. https://acabookfair.noblogs.org
Dr. Mutulu Shakur, ¡Presenté!
New Afrikan revolutionary elder, accupuncturist and revolutionary Dr. Mutulu Shakur joined the ancestors at the age of 72. He was released by the state after 36 years in prison, organizing, healing, educating and inspiring despite having developed a virulent bone cancer. Dr. Shakur spent the last year on this planet continuing his work, speaking and attending events, surrounded by loved ones. Rest in power.
Ruchell “Cinque” Magee Will Be free!
Politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, Ruchell “Cinque” Magee, is slated to be released after 67 years in the California prison system. Cinque is 84 years old, arrested on an indeterminate sentence around a marijuana charge from 1963, he joined the attempted jailbreak during the Marin County Courthouse shootout in which Jonathan Jackson attempted to free William A. Christmas and James McClain. Ruchell was the sole survivor and was a co-defendant of Angela Davis until their cases were split. There is a fundraiser to support Cinque’s post-release needs as an elder: https://fundrazr.com/82E6S2
Rashid’s Treatment Resumes, Thanks To Support!
As an update to past announcements from Kevin “Rashid” Johnson of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party, the public pressure from calls & emails apparently had the desired results and as of a few days ago he was receiving the medical treatment he needs for his prostate cancer, though he hasn’t received all of his papers so he can continue to pursue his lawsuits against the Virginia DOC since they were confiscated by prisoncrats, but he’s super thankful for public engagement to defend his health. More updates on his case can be found at rashidmod.com
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Featured Tracks:
Don’t Play Around (Instrumental) by DJ Nu-Mark from Broken Sunlight Series 6
Black Hole by The Bulletproof Space Travelers from Urban Revolutions – The Future Primitive Sound Collective
We’re happy to share our recent chat with Matilda Bickers, co-editor and contributor to the recent PM Press collection Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex. For the hour we talk about labor organizing in the erotic industries, Matilda’s past experiences in publishing, hangups around sex work in radical communities and related topics. [ 00:01:00 – 00:43:02]
Then, Črna luknja shares an interview with a comrade who’s been living and active in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, so-called Mexico, about increasing violence and fears of civil war. This segment appeared in the June 2023, the 69th episode of BAD News from the A-Radio Network. [ 00:43:02 – 01:01:56[
You can hear some live audio this week starting on July 19th and until July 23rd from the St-Imier anarchist and anti-authoritarian gathering in Switzerland, including audio from the A-Radio Network. More info on that at https://anarchy2023.org/en/radio
Following this is Sean Swain’s segment [ 01:01:56 – 01:09:54]
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Featured Track:
Patricia’s Moving Picture by The Go! Team from Proof of Youth
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Working It Transcription
The Final Straw Radio: Just a quick heads-up: the following conversation does contain references to sexual assault and childhood sexual assault, although there’s not a lot of detail given, but just listener discretion is advised.
Matilda Bickers: My name is Matilda. My pronouns are she/her, and I am a sex worker in Portland, Oregon. I run the outreach project STROLL, and we just published a book, an anthology of sex worker writing and art called Working It.
TFSR: First up, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the collection and the zine that it grew out of. I’d love to hear about STROLL and also some of your publishing history in the sex work industry.
MB: Sure. So I guess I’ll start with when I was 17, I moved to Portland, Oregon, and I met this group of sex workers. They did a zine called Danzine, their group was called Danzine, and they did all of this stuff. They did street outreach, they’d put together a bad date list, which was they called all of the sex workers in the area and asked if they’d seen any bad clients that month. They lobbied for legislation that was friendlier to sex workers. They were just so amazing. They put on art shows, they put on parties, they put on film festivals, and it really changed my life.
They went dormant when I was 18, and I was just like, “That’s what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to do what they did”. So I was a sex worker, and it’s 2005, we tried to start a union at one of our clubs, and it didn’t work. Organizing was just really hard, especially without Danzine around to get the word out. And then when I was 28, I think in 2014, I decided to sue my club for misclassification and sexual harassment. With that money, I started STROLL.
I got a grant from Cascade AIDS Project, which is a local AIDS project here, to do street outreach. Between that and the money I had from the lawsuit, I was just like, “Okay, let’s do this.” So a group of friends and I just started STROLL. We wanted to do a monthly zine, we wanted to do street outreach, we really wanted to do everything that Danzine had done because there was nothing like that since they’d closed in 2003/2002. So that’s what we did, and it was awesome for a while. The pandemic really put a cramp in our style, but we’re actually thinking about a new art. We maybe got a grant to do a new art show, the first one in four years. That’s exciting.
But so Working It was the zine that we put out. First it was supposed to be quarterly, but it’s actually really hard to put out a zine on a regular basis, especially with a group like sex workers, where sometimes you don’t have any money and so you have to cancel whatever you’re doing when you do get the chance to see a client to make that money that you need. It was hard to put out on a regular schedule. It became biannual, and then it became annual. And then I hadn’t put out an issue in like six months, and I was not planning on doing another issue when PM was like, “We’re looking for a sex worker anthology. Working It sounds like it might be a good fit. Can you send us some copies?” And I did, and they were like, “Okay, we want to do an anthology”.
That was 2020, so by that point things have changed so radically that I was like, “I don’t really know how much of old Working It is applicable, I’ll try to solicit new material.” So I approached some friends and was like, “Do you want to help me with this project?” and I was lucky they did. Between that and like word of mouth, we just got a bunch of submissions. We went through them, worked with people. Again it was really hard to get submissions on time. The project went from being due in the fall of 2020 to being due in the winter of 2021 and so on. And then we finally got everything in last fall, and the book came out this spring.
TFSR: When you had mentioned the labor conflict at the club — this is a strip club or a dance club —and the issue of classification is about whether or not you were employees versus independent contractors, is that kind of what it comes down to?
MB: Yeah. So basically strip clubs… We used to be employees, and then in the 90s, people were like “Oh, we can make so much more money if we don’t have to pay our workers.” So they were like, “You’re actually independent contractors, and it’s a better deal for you because you get to keep all your tips”, which mostly we did anyway. You paid a fee to work. I don’t think we paid fees to work as employees.
But anyway, it changed, and so much of this situation has gone by in the last 30 years that now people are really convinced that it’s a better deal to not make a flat minimum wage, to not have benefits, and to pay out the ass to the strip club. I was paying like $300-$400 a night sometimes to work, and that’s really common. There’s nights where there’s no customers, and you leave in debt to the club, and the next night you have to hope that you make enough to pay back your debt and have a profit for yourself.
According to the Bureau of Labor Standards, strippers don’t control enough of our work to be considered independent contractors. Like a plumber would be an independent contractor, somebody that you hire for a really specific job that you pay, they come in, they do the work, they go. But that’s not how strippers are. You have a relationship with the club. You don’t really control when you show up for the most part. You don’t control… You have to wear sexy clothes, you have to wear heels of a certain size. And all of the fees that they charge are mostly illegal. You can’t charge someone to come show up late and then to leave early It’s pretty grotesque.
We ended up settling on the sexual harassment. And I mean, this is off topic, but I just really thought that it would go differently because in the dressing room everyone hated what was happening. We hated the sexual harassment, hated paying so much to work, but as soon as the actual lawsuit came out, people were like, “Nope! Nope nope nope nope nope! We love our club. You are crazy. You are so greedy.” I can’t believe… It just did not go how I thought it would. We settled, I got money, I started STROLL. It worked out in the end. It was pretty traumatic for a while there though.
TFSR: Having been a bartender for a while, in terms of a special engagement with employers where you end up… Because of the way labor law in the US was designed from back in the 1930s, home care, agricultural work, food service are these gendered and racialized categories of labor that were thrown under the bus in the 1930s when the National Labor Relations Act was brought about by FDR. And especially in such like a physically grueling job as dancing at a club, I look back on instances in kitchens where I’ve cut myself accidentally or been out sick and had a contract with the employers, the idea of not having that kind of protection where I could take sick days, maybe even get sick pay, because of some contract that I have, or get workers comp in the easy way that it’s available in a lot of workplaces, just seems to add to the stress of that kind of working environment.
MB: It’s really harsh. There’s a lot of clubs in Portland. You don’t need a lot of money to start up, so there’s a lot of divey bars that are just like “We have naked ladies” and the dancers cover the expense of running the club. I worked at one such club that had broken mirrors on stage, and it wasn’t a problem as long as you didn’t get too close to the mirrors. But I tripped one day, and I fell against the mirror and I cut my hand open, and I had to go to the emergency room for stitches. And it’s just like, that happened. I could try to sue the club for workers comp, but I wouldn’t be able to go back there to work. I would be out of work anyway.
So yeah, stuff like that happens. There’s no protection for germs, or there’s no standards for clean stages. So back in 2004-2007, MRSA just kept going around the clubs. Everyone was getting MRSA. And eventually, I think they caught on, and bleach became a standard for cleaning the stage and stuff. But it just took a long time, and a lot of people were out of work because they had giant abscesses on their butts. It sucked.
TFSR: You mentioned one of the important things about the source of Working It and Danzine and Spread [Magazine].. A lot of the importance of these projects is it’s cool for people to be able to share poetry, to share artwork, to share short fiction and such, and I’m sure that these publications offered an opportunity for people to express their artistic side, but also that it provided that forum for people in erotic industries to share tips, to give heads-up about bad practices or gigs, and to just allow people to chew the fat as far as the employment situation went.
In 2018, FOSTA and SESTA were a couple of laws that were passed at the federal level shutting down platforms, or pressuring in shifts of aspects of many surviving services used by people engaged in sex work for this kind of thing, to talk about bad dates, to talk about dangerous clubs or clubs that would rip you off, employers that sort. These websites weren’t necessarily “by sex workers for sex workers” model that these zines were, but people hack what they have to do what they want.
Five years and a pandemic out from the laws passages, I wonder if you could speak a little bit about people’s ability working in the erotic industries to share important info, and you don’t have to name out any specific methods that would get those targeted, but I’d be curious to hear how people have hacked it.
MB: Yeah, it’s been interesting. At first, it was really, really harsh in the first two, three years after because a lot of platforms that people used to advertise and screen clients were shut down, and there just wasn’t anything. People gradually find… they hack what’s out there. There’s new blacklist sites where you can, if you have the app and know people (you have to know people is the thing) you can check who’s a bad client. Then there’s things like The Dancers Resource which rates clubs around the country for dancers from a dancer’s perspective.
There’s stuff out there but now you can’t just Google “bad client list” or “escort reviews.” The stuff that exists now for sex workers, you have to know someone. People starting out in the industry, unless they’re on something like Reddit already — the good forums on Reddit screen, so you have to be a sex worker to join them — so new sex workers are just… I feel like they’re kind of screwed. And that really sucks. Because you need the community, but a lot of people just… you can’t trust people you don’t know. So if they don’t have an established history as a sex worker, they’re kind of out of luck until they build one.
Yeah, it’s harsh. But there are open forums on Reddit that clients can access that are less secure, but you can get generic tips on that. There’s people on Tumblr, on Instagram. It’s out there if you are really dedicated, but it’s not the same. It’s not the same level of ease. You can’t access it with the same level of ease that you used to be able to.
TFSR: As an outcome of those two laws did you notice distinctive changes in the ways, besides the way that people communicated with each other, in how sex work was operating? Or how people were talking about in their distinct cities shifts because of the shutting down to the sort of platforms?
MB: Well, clients got a lot more emboldened, and so did people who make money off of sex workers. Pimp is a really loaded term, and legally, it covers anybody from like a friend that you pay the do security… Anybody who takes money is a pimp or a trafficker, even when the relationship is much more complicated than that. But people who want to have an exploitative relationship with sex workers were really emboldened. I think everyone I know got contacted and was like “Are you running out of clients? I have a client list. I can help you.”
Then clients were like, “There’s more of you than there are of us. We have the money, we have the power.” A lot of people didn’t submit the screening anymore. They were just like, “We don’t have to. You’re desperate. You don’t have advertising forums anymore, so you have to take what you can get”. There was a lot of violence, I think Hacking//Hustling was tracking how many people were reported dead or missing in the months after SESTA. So it was really scary for a long time. And it still sucks. It’s still not great.
TFSR: So you and Melissa Ditmore in the introduction touch on the trafficking framing of anti-prostitution law enforcement in this country, in the USA, that it’s often built around this idea of preserving the innocence of this character of the white cis woman, protecting their innocence for marriage to a white cis man and procreation of white families, that that’s a part of the imaginary that has at times been more or less coded into law.
Conversely, police, laws, courts, and prisons have engaged the bodies of women and other people of color as a threat to the stability of the white nation and the white family. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about white patriarchal imaginary and the discourse of sex trafficking in the US.
MB: Yeah, it’s I think that from the beginning sex trafficking has been really useful for white patriarchy to reinforce it. Everybody’s fears of like “the other,” the dark-skinned rapist “other” man who isn’t a white man, and innocent white womanhood and sexuality, it just funnels so beautifully into that trafficking hysteria. It hasn’t changed that much. It’s really kind of surprising to me how little it’s changed since 1912, which is when I think the Mann Act was passed. I forget.
But this woman just shot a man of color in Texas. He was her Uber driver, and he was taking her to the city that she wanted to go in, but trafficking hysteria on the internet has reached the point where she was like, “Oh my God, he’s kidnapping me!” and she shot and killed him. These white supremacist narratives serve to reinforce the status quo.
You get Cindy McCain looking at a man of color with his daughter, who I think was mixed race, and they were in an airport. Have you heard about this story? They were in an airport, and Cindy McCain was like, “Oh my God, he’s trafficking her!” and he was her father. But this hysteria blinds people to really obvious realities. It makes them so afraid that you can’t talk to them about it. The fear is so intense that somebody would shoot their Uber driver, rather than just be like, he’s probably taking me… Like what are the odds?
It’s so intense to me. If you don’t trust people of color, and you’re like “They’re out to traffic me!” you can’t build solidarity around that. You can’t see what’s actually happening, which is that white supremacy is closing in around us and taking away our autonomy and limiting us and destroying the world, really.
TFSR: I think a thing that that approach has shown over and over again is that it fills a certain psychological need, maybe, that the system imbues in us, in a lot of people in the US, especially white folks, for this sort of danger-narrative. For this fear, this existential fear that we’re already experiencing. Whether it be in the explicitly racialized version or not. Whether it be the idea of the groomer or QAnon trafficking, like farming children for endocrine or whatever, or the groomer narratives around trans folks and queer folks generally. But it doesn’t actually make victims, like actual victims of trafficking, any safer. It actually seems like it endangers them a lot more. You talk about that a little bit in the introduction too and the inactivity or the shifting of focus from where many cases of assault and trafficking actually occur. Can you talk about that a little bit and that shift?
MB: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, agriculture is the number one vehicle for trafficking. By millions of people. It’s just millions more people that are being abused sexually or commercially sexually exploited. And you can be sexually exploited in agriculture. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. But it just doesn’t have the same visceral resonance, I guess, with white people that the trafficking narrative does.
You were talking about the labor laws of the 1930s, and I just found out that actually agricultural workers were deliberately left out of those because most of them were Black, and white people didn’t want to extend protections to Black people. And I was just like, “Oh my God.” And from early on, you just have these structures that are built, and they don’t go away unless you really address them. And people don’t want to address them. It’s too innate in our society for us to want to see them.
But yeah, the majority of people experiencing commercial sexual exploitation are women of color. They’re youths of color, they’re LGBT youth, they’re people in domestic violence situations. They don’t fit the “kidnapped/Taken white girl” narrative. And that is also less appealing, I guess, to the media. We don’t have the same empathy for them that we do for supposedly innocent white people, and that’s how you get people like Cyntoia Brown, who are being sexually exploited as youth, and they defend themselves, and they go to prison. And Cyntoia is lucky, luckier than most because she got like Kim Kardashian on her side, and she got out early. But there’s a lot of people who are still suffering in prisons for defending themselves against their traffickers.
We’re so deliberately closed off to the reality of what’s happening that the Oakland police force in 2016 or so, so many people in the Oakland Police Force were involved in sexually exploiting this young girl that they ran through something like nine police chiefs in two weeks. Every time they got a new one that came out that that person was also involved in sexually exploiting her. That didn’t really make the news that it should have, and not very much changed. Eventually they found a police chief who wasn’t involved in it. She had a lawsuit against the city, and she’s doing okay now.
We don’t want to look at the ways that our system actually enables exploitation, the ways that laws are really set up to enable and further exploitation. Most sexual abuse happens from somebody you know, often happens in the family, and we don’t have any will to look that straight in the eye and address it. There’s no political will to do that, which is really sad to me. It’s really frustrating.
TFSR: So connected to this, I’ve heard people working in the sex industry expressed that there’s a massive failure of leftist, labor and feminist movements, including anarchists, to sufficiently address both the dignity of sex workers as workers, as well as the validity of people’s choices to engage in erotic labor. I’m guessing it’s maybe because as you note in some of your writings that people have trouble deriding an industry and the bad practices within an industry without devaluing the labor that people are forced to get extracted from them in order to make a living. How do you think that non-sex worker leftists more broadly, and anarchists specifically, could be better allies?
MB: I think there just needs to be a lot more conversations, and people need to be a lot more willing to put themselves on the line and do things that are going to be unpopular. Which, in this climate, I totally understand why people don’t want to put themselves out there. You don’t want an internet mob to get mad at you and go after you. But that’s the only way. You have to just take a stand that’s unpopular, which is that sex workers deserve rights and protections.
I feel like there’s a lot of talking points that people could use that don’t get used. You always hear “sex work is not sex trafficking,” and it can be. Any work can be exploited, and sex work is work. Sex work can be exploited. I feel like a better talking point would be like all of this stuff is already illegal. Like child sexual abuse is illegal, rape is illegal. And obviously it doesn’t get addressed, but that is not the problem of sex workers. That’s a cultural problem, and we need to be addressing that.
The problems that people have with the sex industry are just problems that they have with the culture, our culture at large. Sex work is illegal, it’s already illegal. And that’s not changing anything. Like sex work still exists, child sexual abuse still exists, sexual exploitation still exists. You can’t make things that are illegal more illegal. You can increase the punishments, but it doesn’t do anything to address the material realities that lead to these things, which is that we don’t we don’t value women, we don’t value children, we don’t value people of color. We don’t care when their autonomy is infringed upon, and we enable power to reinforce itself.
I feel like those are all pretty good talking points, but they are uncomfortable. Again, it is uncomfortable to admit that most sexual abuse occurs from somebody you know, that things that are illegal still happen. It’s funny, we’re willing to face that with murder. True Crime podcasts are so popular, but when it comes to sex, I don’t know, people have real hang ups about sex. I guess that’s another thing that we need to start talking about more is that like, sex is natural. It happens. I don’t, I don’t know what more to say. But people have problems with it.
TFSR: In your essay “Intimate Labor” in that collection, you talked about the scenario that you experienced where you were working in a club and you were engaging with some of the customers around the possibility of them doing sex work. So sort of like, it seems like pressing boundaries and also being playful and just kind of testing the waters to be like, “Well, you’re engaging with this in a certain way as a consumer, but would you… Is this a thing that you would engage with?” And I think you had some “Would you consider dancing, like doing a private dance for someone in a professional setting?”
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your thoughts on the trap of moralizing the act of sex as something that is either only sanctioned by the Church or the State, and the choices that people make, without money changing hands, to informally exchange erotic work for shelter or relative safety. And like the distinction that people express towards comparing these acts, where somebody will have sex with someone or do something erotic or make them feel a certain way in exchange for getting a thing that they need, and how people put that on a different sort of field of reality from the drudgery that we put ourselves through on a regular basis for a legal wage.
MB: It’s funny, the people who inspired me to first ask that question were these two women who were like flashing the club. They were like taking their clothes off. And so I was just like, ”You’re doing it for free, how much money would you… to just up it a little bit and actually interact with like our customer?” Yeah, it was like ”A million dollars, and he has to be hot!” I was just like, you were just flashing the club for free. I don’t understand the difference.
Actually, I was just listening to this podcast Just Break Up, and the letter writer today was like, “I’m in a polycule. One of my partners just got the offer to be a sugar baby from this woman. I’m fine with him having sex with her, but I’m not fine with him having sex with her for money.” I was just like, “I don’t understand. Like what?” I would understand if she didn’t want to share him with one more person, but just the act of money made it so different to her that she was in crisis and writing to these strangers on Just Break Up.
Sex has this emotional weight. W’re taught that sex has this emotional weight, but only when it’s exchanged for money. Like you go to bars… Like this one person is in a polycule and has multiple partners and has clearly had some thought about relationships. There’s swingers clubs, there’s all kinds of things. People are willing to have sex for free in all kinds of situations that aren’t even safe. But as soon as you add money, they’re just like, “No.”
I don’t think it’s just because it’s criminalized. I could see that weighing in on some people, but the people that I’ve asked, I don’t think they’re thinking about that. It’s just the act of having sex for money would somehow diminish them in a way that they aren’t willing to deal with. It’s just so weird to me because we spend our lives in work that we hate for the most part. Even if you’re lucky and you get a job that you like, it’s still work. But most people don’t have jobs that are really fulfilling. Most people show up to work, they’re cleaning houses, they’re sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day. And you can make this amount of money in like three minutes. Like a lap dance is $20. Or if you sell a half hour, that’s like $250. An hour is $500.
It’s kind of reclaiming your time in a way to me, like that’s what I found so appealing about the sex industry. I don’t like working for other people, I don’t like being around other people, I like sitting at home and daydreaming and reading books. It gives you this return on your time that enables you to do that. It enables you to do the things that you want to do that make life meaningful. And people can’t… they can’t get over their emotional hang-up about exchanging sex for money, even if you put it in terms where you’re like, “Yeah, in one hour you could make half of your rent.” That’s time. That’s like, what, two weeks that you would have back to do whatever you want with? But no, there’s just some kind of mental block. I guess if there weren’t that mental block, more people would do it, and then the market would be saturated. So like, personally, I guess I’m grateful for it. But I do think it’s really strange.
I’ve kind of theorized, like I’ve talked to other people, and I know the rates of child sexual abuse. They’re just high. But I do know a lot of people who did deal with child sexual abuse, including myself, and I wonder if that kind of… the fact that we don’t see sex as sacred anymore… like some people do still see it as sacred, but for me, I was just like, “Oh, this is just a thing, this is just an act, and people can make you feel bad about it, but like I’m not gonna let them make me feel bad about this.” For a while I considered myself contaminated, and then I worked through that. And then I was just like it’s just another thing that people do. It’s on par with picking your nose sometimes, like it can be really gross, it can be really awesome, but it’s just the thing that people do. And I can make money, and then I have this money, and I have all this time to do STROLL, to do street outreach, to do the things that give my life meaning.
I’ve been struggling with the fact that I don’t have time to do the things that give my life meaning anymore because I’m trying to transition out of the industry into nursing. Nursing gives my life meaning, but I struggle with the fact that I can’t read any more, like I can’t read books, I have to study constantly. If I do really backbreaking work for minimum wage. I get sexually harassed by patients. There’s a joke among nurses and nursing students that male patients will want you to hold their penis for them while they pee in the urinal. You don’t have to do that. We tell everyone because if you aren’t already told you’ll get conned into it. I was conned into it.
So like, I’m still dealing with people’s sexual abuse, kind of. Like I do regard that as sexual abuse. It’s not heavy, it doesn’t… It’s just really annoying. But I miss having time, and I miss being paid on a rate that I approve of. Yeah, I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know why people… I guess if it’s just drilled into you from childhood, it’s hard to overcome. But some people overcome it, and some people don’t.
TFSR: I remember back before pandemic began there was a lot of discussion from Red Umbrella Project about pushing for decrim[inalization], where critiques of the.. I don’t know, what you’d call the Nordic model. Similar to the prison system, the Nordic model. Is that still a dialogue that’s going on and being pushed in organizations that you operate in, or has the critique changed since pandemic?
MB: Oh, the Nordic model is deathless. It’s currently rebranded as partial decrim. It’s called partial decrim now because theoretically you’re decriminalizing the seller side but not the purchaser side. But it’s still the Nordic model. It’s still… People still die under it. It’s still stigmatized. They have it in Canada, and rates of murder are still very high among sex workers. Sex workers are still abused.
There’s the case of the woman in Sweden, which also has the Nordic model or Swedish model. She was a sex worker. The sale of sex was legal, but the purchase of it isn’t. But nothing around the sale of sex had been decriminalized. So she was still stigmatized in trying to find an apartment. The child welfare system still discriminated against her and took her kids away. She’d gotten into sex work because she was trying to leave an abusive husband. She did manage to leave him, but they gave custody of her kids to the abusive husband, and she was only allowed to see them on visits with him. On one of the visits with him, he stabbed her and he killed her.
He was obviously not a safe person for children to be around or for her to be around. But because she was a sex worker, the state was like, “No, we’re going to force you into these unsafe situations.” That’s one of my big critiques of the Nordic model is that it doesn’t make sex workers safer. And it doesn’t… it never comes with funding to get you out of sex work. I personally would love to be rescued from sex work. Like I would love for someone to give me money so that I could quit, but there’s never any funding. People email me all the time, and they’re like, “I want to get out of sex work. I’m in a domestic violence relationship,” and I’m like, “There’s nothing, I’m so sorry. There’s nothing.” Like there are some resources for DV [domestically violent] relationships, not enough, but there’s nothing specifically to help you get out of trafficking. Like you can contact the religious organizations and see. Shared Hope International, which is an anti-trafficking organization, is across the river. Sometimes I’ve directed people to them, with the caveat that they’re probably not going to do anything, but you should try. They never do anything. They never are like, “Oh my God, you need rent? You need rent so that you can leave the sex industry? Here’s your rent.”
That’s my biggest critique of the Nordic model is not only that it doesn’t make people safe, but that it never comes with funding, the funding that you need. If you want to eradicate an industry you have to give people options. You have to give them something else to pay their rent, to pay for their child care, to pay for everything. Life costs money under capitalism.
So yes, it’s still around, it’s still a discussion. I have a friend in nursing school, and she’s from Hawaii. And AF3IRM… I don’t know whether you’ve heard of AF3IRM, but they’re a big proponent of the Nordic model in Hawaii. That’s been a conversation lately that she has been sending me little snippets of. Some of their critique is really on point. They talked about how Indigenous women had been affected by colonialism and imperialism, and missing and murdered Indigenous women are missing and murdered because they’re Indigenous. There’s a much higher rate of missing and murdered Indigenous women than there are white women. But the solution to that I don’t think… like they automatically go to “All prostitution is wrong, all prostitution is an extension of imperialism”.
Which, it might be, but you aren’t helping Indigenous women by making it illegal and pushing them further away from resources. Nothing is made better by being made illegal. Like drugs aren’t made safer by being made illegal, alcohol wasn’t made safer by being made illegal. That’s just not how it works. So it’s still out there, still makes me really angry.
TFSR: Coming back to the legislation from five years ago. The assault on sex worker organizing and safety that was FOSTA/SESTA feels like a bellwether for legislation and court decisions at state and federal levels since eroding bodily autonomy around abortion, contraception, education on social struggle, history, gender identity and non-hetero relationships across the country. More plainly said, there’s a huge backlash in the system across the US against any push towards egalitarianism, towards breaking down the patriarchy, the history of racism, all these things. Can you talk about how a robust defense of the rights of people engaging in sex work to better their working conditions and their personal safety dovetails with a defense of sexual and gender autonomy more broadly?
MB: Yeah. I think they’re all issues of bodily autonomy, and they’re all issues around the fact that we need to rethink the way we look at sex and gender and people’s bodily autonomy. It all comes from the same stigma against… I mean, again, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and fear and hatred of sex workers, it all stems from the same white supremacist, patriarchal source. If we’re going to combat any one aspect of it, we need to combat all of it. Like you can’t just leave a little patch of weeds when you’re going through because they’ll take over. Like invasive species… Sorry, my metaphor is a little bit convoluted. But like you can’t leave anything behind, otherwise oppression still exists.
I feel like abortion is a really clear parallel with it. A lot of feminists don’t want to see it that way, but it’s what somebody does with their body, and you can’t tell people what to do with their bodies as long as they’re not harming another person. You can’t do that. Even if I have a friend who uses drugs, and that’s her choice, that’s her right. She gets to decide what’s best for her and how she wants to cope with reality. And she knows what’s best for her. A person who’s pregnant, they know what’s best for them, whether they want to carry the child to term or not. A sex worker without very many options… A sex worker knows what options are best. If there was a better economic option, probably they would be doing that.
TFSR: Are there any sites or projects that if someone is considering getting involved in sex work, or are involved in sex work and maybe aren’t aware of, that would help in their circumstances of organizing or of just day-today survival in the so-called USA, any shining lights that you’d specifically point them towards to help?
MB: There’s local projects like Bay Area Workers Support, Green Light Project up in Seattle, Aileen’s which is just outside of Seattle. I think that SWOP Brooklyn closed. There’s not very many. If you Google SWOP [Sex Worker Outreach Project] you can find local SWOP’s that are more active. SWOP USA isn’t very active. And then there’s local projects, but there isn’t a whole lot to direct people to. There’s the Dancers Resource on Instagram, and they have an app if you are looking to get into dancing. I like the sex worker communities on Reddit, even though if you don’t have documentation that you’re a sex worker you’re not going to be able to get into the secure ones. But yeah, there just isn’t a whole lot out there unfortunately.
TFSR: How can people find you online, and as far as other media sources that carry news of sex worker concerns by sex workers are there any others you want to point people to? I guess that kind of covers some of what was in the last question too.
MB: You can find me online, I’m on Instagram @strollpdx, and that’s really it for me. But let’s see, other media of sex workers… I like to We Too which is an another anthology edited by Natalie West. I don’t know of many newsletters or zines anymore. Stripperweb just shut down this year, which was a really good resource for people. I think there’s an archive of it somewhere, but it isn’t the whole site because that would have been impossible to do.
Really, it’s just kind of bleak these days. There’s a lot of community on Instagram and Tiktok and Reddit, and I would just kind of look for sex workers there. Yeah, there was a sex worker festival in San Francisco this year, Sex Worker Art and Film Festival that Bay Area Sex Workers Support did. But not a lot.
TFSR: Are there any questions that I didn’t ask you about that you wanted to speak on?
MB: I always love going off about like the dancers struggle for rights and like Stripper Strike Noho, and a club here in Portland just voted to join the union. So like that kind of stuff.
TFSR: That’s cool. Do you want to talk about that club and what union it is?
MB: Oh, sure. Yeah, there’s a club in Portland that just voted to unionize, and I think they’re going with Actors Equity. I think it’s the same union that Stripper Strike Noho joined. I can’t remember what club the strippers down in LA were organizing at, but here it’s Magic Tavern. I think it’s so exciting.
The pushback was so intense. It’s always so intense. People are so scary and hateful whenever anyone tries to organize. People died in like the ‘30s for trying to organize, and it hasn’t gotten that much better 80 years later. I think they’re so brave, and I love it. I love watching that. I hope that it goes really well for them, and I encourage people to look up the Magic Tavern Dancers on Instagram. I think it’s @magictaverndancers and @stripperstrikenoho. [@equitystrippersnoho]
Zapatista Update Transcription
Crna Luknja: We have on the line a comrade that is now based in Chiapas, Mexico. Thank you for taking your time to make this conversation with us. Let’s start with some basic information about what you do in Chiapas. If we understand correctly, you are engaged in different forms of practical solidarity with the struggle of the Zapatista communities. Can you be more specific about what is it that you do?
Compa: Yeah, sure. I’m working in a media collective. We’re doing audiovisual formation. We started in 1998, when there were like more open state repression on the Zapatista communities. There my collective came in and brought cameras, like video cameras, and started to get information so that all the repression could be captured and could be shown to the world.
From 2014 on the Tercios Compas, the media compas from the Zapatistas, were founded, and so it wasn’t necessary anymore that we would give information if the EZLN [Zapatista National Liberation Army] would do it by themselves. And so now we’re more working with other struggles here in Chiapas. For example, the defense of territory and stuff like that. But yeah, we’re here, and if communities need some help with movie stuff and media we are here to help.
And also we did cover media in the last caravan. That was The South Resists! And yeah, that was our latest thing we did.
CL: Okay, now let’s turn to the recent worrying events in Chiapas. A few days ago, an urgent news reached us about an attack of paramilitary forces against one of the Zapatista autonomous communities. Can you say more about what exactly happened? How serious was the attack? And are these kinds of attacks against particular communities common?
Compa: Yeah. Okay. On May 22nd there was the last attack on the community Moisés Y Gandhi, which is part of the autonomous municipality Lucio Cabañas, which is part of the 10th Caracol Patria Nueva. And yeah, first from one side of the village they started to shoot members of the town at around 4pm, and at 8pm from the other side of the village another part of ORCAO [The Regional Organization of Coffee Growers of Ocosingo] was starting to fire as well. And in this fire, the compa Jorge López Sántis was shot in the chest.
First he was denied medical service, but after urgent action by human rights centers, they got that he went to hospital in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, which is capital of Chiapas, where he still has inadequate medical care. But yeah, his situation as far as I know, he’s still living.
Sadly, it’s not the only case. There’s also aggression on the community Neuvo San Gregorio, which is also part of Caracol 10. One year ago, there was also the displacement of the community Emiliano Zapata and another community where, yeah, you see that violence against communities from the EZLN still happening.
CL: Okay, you mentioned ORCAO. ORCAO is, if we understand correctly, a paramilitary force that is behind also this latest attack. Can you say more about what ORCAO is? What is the agenda that they have, the methods that they use, who are they fighting for? And what is the relation for ORCAO with the Mexican state?
Compa: Yeah, so I think for explaining what ORCAO is I will go back in history. The translation of ORCAO is Regional Organization of Coffee Growers. It was founded in 1988 and firstly at the function of fighting for fair coffee pricing, so that coffee planters could have a good life, which is a good thing, I think. But in the late ‘90s ORCAO started to work with the state and get state funds and positions and power in the government and things like that, in exchange for doing favors for the government. From then on attacks started. In 2002 they attacked the Poblado Javier López and burned the crops of the Zapatistas that are growing their food there.
And it went on. In 2009 there was the attempt of displacing people from Bosque Bonito, which is another community, and also the attempt to attack the Caracol Morelia while there was an international encounter in San Cristóbal. Also in 2011 they attacked Poblado El Paraíso, destroyed 4,500 coffee plants, and there were armed attacks on support bases of the EZLN. In the following years it went on like that. There’s a large register of the attacks against Zapatista communities. And yeah, sadly also this attack on Moisés Y Gandhi is not a new thing. They started in 2019 to do armed attacks on this community.
There’s total impunity of this organization and their attacks and violence. So I think there you can see like the first connection it has with the state, and also that research of the EZLN brought to light that the money the state was planning for a school was used in arms have of big impact.
Maybe for showing a little bit more how the connection between the state and ORCAO is, I think it’s good to look into the program of counterinsurgency that’s still going on. The open attacks by military and the open repression after Los Acuerdos de San Andrés, this open violence changed more to a low intensity war, and parts of that are the paramilitaries like ORCAO or Los Chinchulines or other paramilitary groups. And displacements, which we see in Chiapas a lot, there’s like 17,000 displaced persons in Chiapas.
Also selective assassinations is sadly a thing that we see often. All of this fits very good into an analysis many critical persons have in Mexico, which is that the State, economic forces like big capitalist firms, and also the organized crime are like doing a thing, the three of them. For example, big landowners very often are the government forces and have their own friends with organized crime. So there’s a really, really powerful connection between these and really much corruption.
Often when there’s a capitalist interest, they may say to the governors “Oh, yeah, we can give you money for implementing our project in this part.” And if the people say no, the organized crime or the paramilitary will hit there, and afterwards, yeah, the capitalist interests can enter there. And so I think this connection is a really visible thing.
CL: How does the EZLN and the Zapatista communities deal with these kinds of attacks and other forms of pressure?
Compa: In the last few years I didn’t hear much about how they answer to these attacks. But a little while longer ago, there was for example in La Garrucha, which is like another Caracol, there were attacks, and the EZLN sent men that were not armed with firearms but just with sticks, but there really were many of the military forces of the EZLN, and they went to this community that was attacked. And the people that were armed with firearms, the aggressors, tried to attack but they went to them and said, “So you can try to kill every one of us, but there really are many of us.” In the end they gave their arms, and they went away because there was too much presence of the EZLN.
The Zapatista communities there are also other strategies like from the civil wing. For example, if there’s a land in dispute that other groups want to enter, sometimes members of the EZLN go there and plant and have their present presence there so the aggressors don’t enter.
CL: Maybe let’s now move a little bit sideways and speak more about the general dynamics in Chiapas in the recent period.
Compa: Yeah, that’s a really, really hard thing. The last six years, more or less, the violence in Chiapas increased a lot. That was for one part, I think, because of the elections and because change of power always brings violence with it here. Also in the last years, there is an open dispute between two cartels, like the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, which is one really big power, and the Cártel de Sinaloa. Chiapas is the most southern state of Mexico. It is the border with Guatemala, and so this plaza, this region, is very important to traffic drugs. So yeah, these cartels are trying to get the control over it, and to do that a lot of violence is happening.
Also, there are territorial conflicts between communities, and so there are armed groups that are willing to give everything to kill for having territory. It’s really crazy around here, like nearly every day you can hear about assassinations, about armed conflict, about a lot of violence. So sadly, the attacks on the EZLN are not the only thing that’s happening. There’s much more of violence going on.
CL: After the Journey For Life there was practically no official declaration from EZLN except a short statement about the war in Ukraine, and that was already in March 2022, so more than one year ago. At the same time, some sources that are linked to the Zapatistas and the supporters of their struggle, such as the schoolsforchiapas.org website, they openly warn that Chiapas is on the brink of, as they put it, civil war. Can you maybe comment, both on the silence of EZLN in the context of high tensions and also on the civil war concept itself?
Compa: Yeah. So I think for one part, the silence of the EZLN is a thing that already has occurred in history. For example, a thing that came up two months ago is the case of Manuel Gómez Vázquez, which is the supporter of the EZLN who was taken prisoner two and a half years ago. And just now, two months ago, the EZLN made their research and they finished it and so they did that case openly. They mentioned it to human rights organizations.
Also, for example, in 2000, before the EZLN went to Mexico City, there was like a period of three years that they didn’t appear publicly. That’s the thing, they take their decisions, and take the time to make good decisions. Also, there was what compañeros in the Journey For Life were telling us. They took 11 years to plan their insurgency, and this is a big thing to plan. But also other things, I think they take their time to do the right decision. And, yeah, maybe in some time, there will be big changes. Or maybe it’s gonna take a little bit longer and it’s not going to be that big. But I think something’s going to happen, and the EZLN certainly knows when they want to let us know
CL: Okay. And about the civil war?
Compa: Ah yeah, the civil war. I think it was in the comunicado they did about the sequestration, the kidnapping of the two bases de apoyo [core supporters] while there was the Journey for Life. And I think they related to this general normalization of violence in Chiapas and that it’s like a really delicate situation. That would be my understanding of this statement of the brink of civil war.
CL: Yeah, we also remember, yes, that during Journey for Life they stressed a lot the challenges ahead and the difficult situation that for sure is awaiting them on their return. I believe that we are quickly running out of time, so I would ask you for the conclusion, just one that’s a classic question. It’s about what can the supporters of the Zapatista struggle from around the world do? Both about this latest particular incidents of violence, and of course, in general. This, and of course if you would like to add something that hasn’t been mentioned before, please feel free to do so.
Compa: Yeah. So I think, sadly, directly here, there can’t be done much because the people in power have the weapons. And what we can do is show our solidarity because international solidarity often can prevent other things to happen and also can do much pressure. So I think for one part, yesterday there was published a national and international statement against the attacks against the Zapatista communities. Also there’s a convocation for the 8th of June for an international day against the aggressions against the Zapatista communities. And I think that’s basically what people around the world can do, show that they see what’s happening and show that the state can’t do this without people noticing all over the world.
CL: Thank you for the time that you took. Greetings from North Western Balkans to the southeast of Mexico. Bye bye.
This week, we’re sharing a conversation with Rose and Crystal, two comrades involved in the struggle against the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 304 mile, 41 inch in diameter liquified so-called natural gas pipeline with a possible 75 mile extension crossing many delicate waterways, slopes and communities across Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina.
This project has been off and on under construction since 2018 and was recently forced through at a Federal level as part of the debt ceiling deal by the Biden administration and Democrats. For the hour we talk about the project, the land and water it threatens, the history of resistance and how to get involved in stopping this mess.
Just a headsup, there are some audio quality issues throughout the conversation with both guests, so if you have trouble hearing consider checking out the upcoming transcript or meanwhile watching on youtube with the subtitles on.
You can find more from the folks resisting the MVP by searching Appalachians Against Pipelines on various social media platforms or check the links in our show notes, where you can also find links to our various interviews with folks from this initiative from the last 5 years.
The channel called Political Prisoners on youtube, linked in our show notes, has begun a series of short documentaries about Sean, the first of which you can find entitled “Part One: A Visitation Dispute”. Check it out!
Disability Pride Art Show
The Disability Pride Art Show aims to celebrate the rights of disabled individuals through the power of art. This one-day event will take place on July 30 at the vibrant venue, Different Wrld, located in 801 Haywood Rd. The show embraces the core values of acceptance and inclusivity, emphasizing the inherent worth and talents of disabled individuals. Presented by DIYabled, a local nonprofit organization, and with This Body is Worthy.
Featuring a diverse lineup of 25 talented artists, writers, video artists, and dancers, the Disability Pride Art Show promises to captivate audiences with a rich variety of artistic expressions. Attendees will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the thought-provoking documentary “Disability on the Spectrum,” created by local artist Priya Ray. The film sheds light on the experiences and perspectives of disabled individuals, fostering greater understanding and empathy within our community.
Rashid’s Continued Denial of Cancer Treatment
Check our show notes for Rashid’s message, but as noted last week, incarcerated revolutionary of the Intercommunal Black Panther Party, Kevin Rashid Johnson, is continuing to be denied his rounds of cancert treatment for prostate cancer and has been shoved in a solitary confinement cell without working lights. In the show notes and at our website you’ll also find contacts for prison officials in Virginia who need pressure applied to get Rashid the medical treatment he needs, outside of the dungeon they’ve stuck him in.
Comrades:
This is Rashid. I need all possible SUSTAINED and immediate support.
Here is a statement of my situation.
OFFICIALS DEVISE TO STOP MY CANCER TREATMENT AND BLOCK MY COURT ACCESS
(2023)
By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson
I have been going out daily since early April 2023 for radiation
treatment at the Medical College of Virginia – a total of 40 treatments – which is ongoing. On 6-29-23 upon returning to the prison from the hospital I was thrown in solitary confinement without explanation, where I remain, without any property including all my legal property.
I was put in cells without working lights, where I remain.
After constant complaints all I’m being told is I am under
investigation, but not by prison investigators. I spoke with a prison
investigator, a Lieutenant Spencer, on July 1 when she delivered me
legal mail, asking about my status and access to my legal property. She informed me, while her body camera was recording, that I am under investigation by other state prison investigators and the prison was not withholding my legal property. She said any supervisor could get my property for me which was in the property department.
Despite this everyone refuses to deliver my belongings and I have been kept in an empty cell ever since. This despite that the VDOC is under court orders to not interfere with my access to and use of my legal property and I have numerous court deadlines and a pending federal civil trial in one of my lawsuits.
On 6-30-23 officials refused to allow me to attend my cancer treatment.
My numerous written emergency complaints about this went unanswered and unprocessed.
On 7-3-23 after days in an empty cell without my things I declined to go for my treatment that one day to try and call the courts to explain and seek intervention. Officials including the warden and assistant warden refused me a legal call and are now refusing all my future cancer treatments.
The entire claim to have me under investigation is facially invalid and illegal. As any legal authority recognizes, law enforcement officials must perform investigations consistent with the search and seizure provisions of the 4th Amendment. And any “unlawful search or seizures” renders any evidence gathered therefrom illegal. Both the seizures and searches of me and my property have been unlawful from the outset. My belongings, my legal property in particular was taken and searched outside my presence, which is illegal. Prison officials may only open our legal mail and search our legal property in our presence. That is constitutional law. Here in Virginia we may only be removed from General population and put in solitary if written notice is given within 24 hours. I received no such notice.
People to contact:
CLARKE, HAROLD W(804) 887-8080 HAROLD.CLARKE@VADOC.VIRGINIA.GOV
DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION (DOC/CA, 701)
ROBINSON, DAVID N (276) 524-3685 DAVID.N.ROBINSON@VADOC.VIRGINIA.GOV
WALLENS RIDGE STATE PRISON (WRSP, 735)
HERRICK, STEPHEN M
(804) 887-8118
Email~ STEVE.HERRICK@VADOC.VIRGINIA.GOV CORRECTIONS – DIVISION OF
INSTITUTIONS (DOC/DI)
. … . ..
Featured Tracks:
Cumberland Blues by Fiddlin’ Doc Roberts from Mountain Blues: Blues, Ballads and String Bands
System’s Gonna Burn by Wren & Acre (based on Woody Guthrie’s “Fascists Bound To Lose”)
When You Think MVP by Yellow Finch residents
. … . ..
Transcription
Crystal: I am Crystal (she, her). I live on stolen Monocan and Tutelo land, Eastern Montgomery county where the Mountain Valley Pipeline is crossing through.
Rose: I’m Rose (she, her). I live in so-called West Virginia, on stolen Monacan land. I am not originally from here or Appalachia. I’ve been in the fight against the Mountain Valley Pipeline for over five years now and have been involved in other fights against extraction, like fracking. Crystal, do you want to add a little bit about your involvement before we get started?
C: It’s been about five years now. I just started monitoring it when I noticed the cut coming through near the river here. I do jail solidarity work. And we had a Prisoner Speak-out, and one of the people that came to that event was from Blacksburg and got to talk. They let me know what that cut was, and they had actually been riding the route for quite some time taking pictures. I got to go with them, and that’s how it started for me. I was just riding around with someone I met at a Prisoner Speak-out.
TFSR: So what is the Mountain Valley Pipeline? What companies are trying to build it or planning to operate it? What’s it supposed to carry through? Where and for what market? Just all the big who, what, where, when things.
R: I can start maybe with what the Mountain Valley Pipeline is. Do you want to jump in, Crystal, with some of the companies behind it?
C: Sure.
R: The Mountain Valley Pipeline is a 42-inch diameter, 300-mile long pipeline. Just to note, 42 inches is huge. For anybody who’s trying to envision this, you can get in this pipe and crawl around in it, it’s so big. The pipeline is slated to begin in so-called northern West Virginia, it runs into so-called Central Virginia. And there’s a possible extension into so-called North Carolina – called the South Gate Extension. We’re going to largely be talking about the main line, not the South Gate Extension. It’s because they’re in very different phases at this point. This pipeline is going to carry pressurized fracked natural gas through it, which will ultimately expand fracking in the whole region – in northern West Virginia.
C: Some of the major investors and stakeholders in this NextEra Energy, Consolidated Edison, also known as ConEd, Atlas Gas ltd, and Roanoke Gas Company – which is a local gas company here that owns about 1% of this, which made it qualify for the eminent domain court. They have built a gate station here in Elliston in the part of EastMont. They since have raised the cost to their customers to cover their ass in this terrible investment.
It only hurts the working and poor folks already struggling in Roanoke with recent high rent costs and ongoing gentrification in Northwest Roanoke, which is a predominantly black and under-resourced community, also a food desert. For these people in it, this is their drinking water also. That water is not even taken from the Roanoke River right now, the river that this project will bore under. It’s because of “forever chemicals” were found a couple of months ago. So it’s just all madness to add this pipeline in. There’s already enough bullshit happening, and recently after they got the stamp of approval from Biden, they have said that now they’re only going to run this at 35% capacity. The whole idea was how we need this so bad for national energy security. Now, after they get everything that they want, they come out and they are saying, they’re only going to maybe run it at 35%. So how bad is it really needed to tear up everything for 35%?
R: Yeah, and just to be totally clear, we know that projects like this don’t meet a need for natural gas and fossil fuels, they actually create the demand. That’s an important thing that Crystal is getting at. And when we’re just talking about this 300-mile long route, which is quite extensive, we’re also talking about fracking, which – for folks who aren’t familiar with that process – is an incredibly toxic extractive process, where really toxic chemicals are pumped into the ground to crack shale that releases natural gas. We don’t know what’s in those chemicals. There’s all kinds of reports of people getting really sick in the frack fields, water being poisoned, air quality being terrible. So we’re not only talking about this pipeline, we’re talking about expanding fossil fuel extraction in general, and just sort of being pushed further into Climate Chaos.
C: If I can add on to that… On the 1st of October, I got to go to the Gulf Coast and met with the Port Arthur [Community Action Network]. John Beard is the person with that, but also Rise, St. James with Sharon Lavigne in Louisiana. I got to see all the new export facilities being built there. And these folks are already burdened. They’re waking up at 6:30 in the morning with a headache. I was using my inhaler, because of the air quality. We’re crying now about the smoke that’s hitting us here and how bad it is, and these people live this every day, and they’re actively constructing 10 export facilities, which wasn’t even a thing until 2015. Obama lifted that – from what I learned down there. So it’s just contributing to Cancer Alley.
TFSR: Sounds like the EPA just pulled back from a lawsuit concerning the impacts of a civil rights claim around Cancer Alley about cancer levels among residents there. Between the fires and what you’re talking about – the actual flow of gas and export of these things, and also the water pollution, it really shows the fundamentally global level of the impacts of these things.
Would you mind saying a few things about the terminology of natural gas, because that’s how it’s marketed and that’s how it’s talked about. We can talk about it – LNG, or liquefied natural gas. But there’s a weird framing to that term, as the industry has gotten that phrase to be normalized.
R: It’s a really good point that natural gas sounds like maybe something that’s a little bit cleaner and greener. That is what they’ve tried to market since the fracking boom. Just to be clear, things have really changed in the last 10 or 20 years, when it comes to fracking. There’s new technology that makes it more dangerous than it’s ever been, especially with the horizontal drilling that happens in the fracking process. There was this discovery that maybe the extraction industry could access more natural gas than they could before with the development of new technology, like horizontal drilling and the slew of toxic chemicals that are protected by trade secrets, so we don’t actually know what’s in that toxic mix.
There’s always been this idea since that fracking boom, that natural gas could be a bridge fuel for us, as we’re “moving away from coal”. I say, quote – unquote, because they are still expanding coal and mountaintop removal mining for coal, in Appalachia, in West Virginia, I’m sure in other places, too. There’s this imagined idea that natural gas is going to be a safe way to help us move away from fossil fuels. And I think the marketing of calling it natural helps frame that imaginary idea. You mentioned the fires, Crystal is talking about what’s happening in the Gulf, it’s clear that there’s not actually time for us to be really invested in some bridge fuel with a rate of climate change. Crystal, do you want to jump in on any of that?
C: No, because I think you know much more about that. I’ve just entered this fight, not as an environmentalist, but it was just something that was happening basically in my backyard.
I’ve learned a whole lot since this. Like the fact that they recycled the frack gas by putting it down on the roads before it snows, which just makes me cringe. I think about all the deer and the wildlife that you see on the side of the road, licking that after a snowfall. Those are things I never knew, or that we just don’t know. They call it a brine. And it’s really recycled fracked wastewater, and it’s pretty disgusting. We have tributaries, we’re at the bottom of mountains, so we have water everywhere, there’s so many unnamed waters. This stuff just runs. This recycled frack gas blasting wastewater is being pawned off on unsuspecting people like me, who just think: “Oh, that’s great, they’re gonna keep the roads clear when it snows”. Really I would just rather not, if that’s what we’re going to use. So that’s my rant about the fracked gas industry.
R: Yeah, the waste that comes from the fracking process – it’s a really important point – because a certain amount of the chemicals are sucked back up after, and a lot of them end up in injection wells, which are exactly what they sound like – just wells of frack waste in the ground, or like Crystal said, this stuff ends up on the side of the road. We’re talking about a product that people are calling natural gas, meanwhile it’s generating radioactive waste. It’s a really good point that they’ve really tried to market this in a way that makes it sound like it’s so much better. It technically does burn cleaner than coal, that’s how they’ve been able to do that. I think the campaign has certainly been launched against coal and the amount of coal that’s burning is on the decline, but natural gas just isn’t a solution.
TFSR: I’m assuming that in the competition between different methods of creating electricity for consumers, or industry, the motivations are not just based on pure science, or on what’s going to cause the least amount of damage to whatever environments they’re passing through (they’re pulled from), or where they’re being burned. In some cases, some of the same companies like Peabody or others, have their fingers in things like liquefied natural gas throughout the transition process. And it’s not so much like ending one process, as you said. There’s still a lot of power plants around the country that burn coal, and it’s coming from somewhere, as much as it is just industries finding new markets and ways to extract that stuff with federal subsidies.
Crystal, I had no idea about the brine solution that was used in some places to halt freezing of roads. I had heard of that happening, but I didn’t know if that was just saltwater from the coast. Or I had heard that in some places, like in the Midwest they still use salts from sugar beets, a byproduct of that. I had no idea. That’s wacky and scary.
C: It’s so gross. It’s not in every state. I don’t think it’s legal in Virginia, but Pennsylvania. There’s some states that do have it. I don’t think we’re actually doing it here. But it’s still a thing. Everything runs down this way, into another river. It’s all heading to the Gulf.
TFSR: That’s a really good point. There have already been years of struggle in a few different forms that have led to what seemed like an end to the the Mountain Valley Pipeline or MVP project. People have been resisting on site and at corporate headquarters and all over the place. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind talking a little bit about some of the phases of the struggles, and also what pipe was laid by these companies?
C: Well, I can say that people have been fighting the pipeline since it was proposed in all the ways through conventional channels, like courts, going to meetings, writing, letters, lobbying, grassroots organizing, and people have been taking direct action since construction began in 2018. Rose, you want to talk a little bit more about that?
R: I know, you have interviewed some folks throughout the direct action campaign, especially from Yellow Finch, which I can talk a little bit about and I’m sure Crystal can talk a little bit about as well, but the start of the direct action campaign happened in the so called Jefferson National Forest in the beginning of 2018 on Peters Mountain. This is really important, beloved mountain to this fight. The Appalachian Trail runs across the top of it. It’s of incredible ecological importance, but also just very important to the surrounding community. MVP came for that mountain as one of the first places because they knew that, and folks were in the trees along the Appalachian Trail to stop them.
So, two tree-sits along the Appalachian Trail stopped construction up there for 95 days. They were reinforced with other blockades further down the road, including a monopod blockade and a skypod blockade. Later that year MVP actually lost their permits to go through the Jefferson National Forest. So if it wasn’t for folks helping stop construction in that forest, pipe may have already been laid there. In a little bit, we can talk more about what the landscape of that looks like now, but until very recently, they still didn’t have those permits to go through the National Forest, they had been twice revoked. After 2018, the direct action campaign has continued for over five years and dozens of people have put their bodies on the line to stop the pipeline. There’s been some really creative blockades, like a local grandmother, Becky Crabtree, who locked herself in her first ever car, a Ford Pinto, to stop construction at her farm. In summer of 2021, three self-described old folks locked themselves to a car blockade to stop access on an access road.
There have been people who have locked themselves to giant wooden animals that are found in the area. The longest lasting blockade of the campaign was the Yellow Finch tree sits, which were outside of Elliston, Virginia, for two and a half years protecting some of the last remaining trees on the route.
C: I just wanted to add, that there’s been college professors, raging grannies, there’s been young folks. So many people from different walks of life have stepped up and definitely put their body on the line, and had to deal with the courts and all that mess. Yellow Finch tree-sits… If “fuck around and find out” really should be in the dictionary, it’d be about Yellow Finch tree-sits because of them leaving those tree-sits up for 932 days. There was a community built among people that would probably have never talked in everyday life, if it wasn’t for this fight against the Mountain Valley Pipeline. That space allowed for a lot of good conversations, a lot of learning about each other, and how much we really do have in common. And I think that’s what made this movement so strong and resilient and determined when it comes down to it. If it has shown grit all the way around, it’s just really from the Yellow Finch tree-sits. It just taught us all a whole lot about a lot of things in a magnificent, beautiful way. And that is something that can never be taken back. That should be the definition for “fuck around and find out”. That’s all I’m gonna say about the Yellow Finch.
R: I definitely agree. All of these tactics, in conjunction with the legal challenges, have successfully stalled this pipeline for over five years. The original completion date was the end of 2018. Now it’s 2023. They say they’d like to finish it by the end of the year. We’re going to stop them from finishing it by the end of the year. It is important to acknowledge all the work that has gone in to get us to this point. There is a lot of pipe in the ground right now, but there’s a lot of areas left there. We just learned they had 643 water crossings at least. They had always said they were halfway done, but now we know there’s probably over 643. There’s the national forest that I was talking about and Peters Mountain. There’s a lot of really challenging terrain for them to cross still.
TFSR: It’s okay if you don’t have an answer to this: I know that between these and other methods that people had of slowing the process, the companies involved in this have lost millions of potential dollars that they were going to be earning off of this at every step of the way. For these companies, is there no bottom to their pockets? Or are they getting a bunch of federal subsidy or state subsidies to cover the cost of lost potential profits due to the the weight they’ve had to make to try to build this project out?
C: I would love to know, maybe Rose knows. I do want to just point out that this project was a little bit over 3 billion originally, and now they’re up to 6 billion.
R: I think that a lot of the investors had capped their investments. MVP still really could be in financial trouble, in my opinion, and I don’t know about federal subsidies, but I do think they have been in very serious debt from this project for a long time, and the investors had been very unhappy. Personally, I find a little bit of hope in that.
TFSR: I had been under the impression before this conversation that the project had actually been canceled. I was slightly mixing it up with the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the ACP, because they were both planned to be built in the same general region. There was a lot of resistance going around to both the projects at the same time, even though they covered different terrains. Do a lot of people work off of that same presumption that the MVP was canceled? Is that a conversation that you’ve been having a lot recently?
C: I have had people in my community talk, that they had thought that it had gotten canceled. So yes, and even with some of the court rulings, it’s all very confusing. I’m a single mom and I work a regular job during the week. To keep up with all this mess… The only reason I’m able to do that is because I’ve found myself in a space with others. At the Yellow Finch tree-sits, I’ve gotten to meet other people who can look into these things better, direct me to where I need to be paying attention. But not everybody has that, because you just hear what’s on the local news or whatever. There’s been a lot of misconceptions that this pipeline was canceled – and it really should be. It was attached to that National Debt Ceiling. I don’t know if we’re going to talk about that, but it’s important to know that this company had court hearings, they had lost permits, and after it was signed to that Debt Ceiling, they have no judicial role now. We don’t even know if we get violations, which we will, because that’s what happened in 2018, when they were actively working. We’re not even sure, if they can even get in trouble for it. They have free range right now, to do whatever they want to do. And that’s scary and should be alarming for anybody.
R: This is important to mention. Before Congress essentially bailed out this pipeline project, they were in serious financial trouble, we’ve mentioned – billions of dollars in debt. They were still tied up in court, earlier this year, they lost an important permit to cross state waterways in West Virginia, which impacted their federal permit to cross all waterways. It was unclear whether they would be able to finish this pipeline by the end of this year or at all. So in a lot of ways, it felt like the fight was really being won. A lot of people assumed they never were going to build it based on how that direction was going. There also hasn’t been any construction since the fall of 2021. Locally, people are looking at the project and seeing that, and thinking that probably it’s over. So it is an important conversation to be having and to make the distinction, more regionally and nationally with the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which was canceled, and far less of that pipe is in the ground. It’s definitely a separate set of circumstances. We were just on hold here, thinking that it was likely that it might not go based on how badly things were going for MVP.
C: I definitely didn’t think they would be working this summer, because it would have taken that long for them to get that permit back from West Virginia, to rewrite all that stuff. I definitely wasn’t expecting this at all.
TFSR: Because it’s part of that package that’s been signed, it supersedes all the local challenges that the executive has (which the EPA falls under) at a federal level. They have decided not to pursue blocking it anymore due to the Debt Ceiling agreement? Is that an OK way of looking at it?
R: Just to be really clear about what this new law says, the one that was slid into the Debt Ceiling Deal… This new law mandated that they get all of their permits back within 21 days of the law being passed, which they did just a few days ago. I don’t know that there was any recourse for the other agencies involved. It was just like – “the law is there, now you got your permits”. Crystal was mentioning this earlier – a really scary thing about the law is that now there’s no legal challenges. These ways that have been really successful and slowing the pipeline in conjunction with protests at headquarters, people doing direct action on the ground… This important channel for challenging, slowing and stopping the pipeline has been taken away. The new law says that you can’t challenge permits or the pipeline at all. You can only challenge this law in a specific court. So you’d have to challenge the law as a whole. It’s the way to legalize environmental violations and throw all regulation as far as these things go to the wind.
A lot of us are not surprised that this has happened. It is just a very extreme way to show the power that the fossil fuel industry has and how the state will essentially do anything to save them when they’re floundering. This was a failing project. I can’t really imagine another way they could have been saved other than this. It’s clear that the state, and the fossil fuel industry are together in that way. This is a really classic example and a very extreme one.
TFSR: Besides the pushing this through that federal agreement, the landscape has changed in terms of the repercussions for people engaging in actions concerning what’s considered to be vital infrastructure. Not only since the resistance at Standing Rock, but also MVP, ACP, low LFE [26.46] and other anti-pipeline struggles. Also since the George Floyd uprising, a number of states have passed new laws, threatening extra or advanced charges against people that are doing civil disobedience or direct action that relates to what’s considered public infrastructure projects, despite whether those are activities that would harm people or not.
I wonder if you have anything to say about that? Or if that’s the thing that seems like it would affect this and the legal needs for support infrastructure for folks that are going to be trying to stop the MVP from spreading?
R: I can certainly talk a little bit about repression that has happened in the past, and maybe whether or not that’s a sign of what will happen in the future. We’ve been fighting this pipeline through direct action for over five years, and folks have definitely caught some very serious charges. People have had felonies, people have had threats of terrorism charges. A felony has never stuck in the campaign, all of those felonies have been thrown out. But the state has definitely tried to throw all kinds of bullshit at people. It’s really impressive that people have continued to fight in the face of that repression and had some real consequences. The final Yellow Finch tree-sitters that were extracted from those tree-sits – each spent months in jail. There was a really vibrant community that wrote letters and showed their support. We hope to not see that kind of state repression in the future, but we know that it is certainly possible just based on what they’ve done in the past. There could certainly be a time of need for support.
C: I’ll just say that about threats of terrorism act: I stayed up in a tree for three days at Yellow Finch myself, and one of the main reasons I did that was because it really pissed me off that they were going to try to charge two folks with threat of terrorism. I’m a grandmother, I clean houses locally. That was in solidarity. Okay, then arrest me too with a terrorist charge. What they’re doing is not terrorist. We had a local insurrectionist from the January 6 event, who was out on bond the next morning, and the two that got arrested for the tree sits, I’m pretty sure they they did not get a bond and got extra time that took off from their good time.
So, when we’re talking about repression, it’s always a certain group that is getting that. More of us have to be brave and staying in solidarity, now more than ever and trust that the people are going to have our backs also. We’re talking about being scared. Well, myself personally – I’m being scared of what charges they may throw coming forward. I deal with that myself. How can I make sure that I’m being supportive in all the ways, not just a grandmother, but as a local community person who is now gonna have to start going to the supervisory board meetings here locally, to make sure that folks within a mile of this pipeline know the evacuation route. Where is that? Who do they call when they see things going bad? There’s not even an odorant in this pipeline, so they wouldn’t even know if it’s leaking. We live next to train tracks and interstate and if it is leaking, anything can spark that, and this is going to be a catastrophe. They have so many landslides already on, by looking that information up on their FERC [Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] docket. I think protecting people can be scary, but it’s just the humane thing to do.
R: I just want to acknowledge this, since we’re having conversation about repression, that a lot of folks over the years have put their bodies on the line in the path of this pipeline and risk arrest. We know that risking arrest in that way does require a certain degree of privilege for many folks. This is why it’s so important to us, as people that don’t think pipelines should exist, but also don’t think that prisons should exist – to engage in prisoner support work, jail solidarity work and abolitionist work. I just want to just throw that in as we’re having this conversation. Crystal and I are both engaged with some of that work.
TFSR: Southern and central Appalachia have historically been zones of extraction, under settler colonial USA. Not unlike the rest of Turtle Island, or so-called North America, but they’ve been a source for coal, for timber, and for other raw materials to be removed at great human and natural cost, leaving behind devastation for short-term profit for a few. Can you speak about the Mountain Valley Pipeline in this legacy of devastating the landscape for extraction and the resistance that people put up to it in that manner?
R: I can start on that. So, like you mentioned, there is long history of outsiders coming in and profiting off of Appalachia’s resources and leaving a slew of environmental, social and economic devastation in its wake. We’ve seen this in a variety of ways. The coal fields and areas where Mountain Top Removal [MTR] is active, are really good examples. There are so many issues in those areas that can be traced back to the coal industry: undrinkable water, terrible air quality, high cancer rates, the opioid epidemic and unemployment.
Like I said before, I just want to acknowledge that that is still happening. There’s this idea that coal is really on the decline, but new MTR permits are being issued, and mines are expanding. That is definitely an area that feels like a sacrifice zone to a lot of people. There’s a long history of this since colonization of the people in Appalachia and land of Appalachia – they are being expendable. You know, like the Battle of Blair Mountain – we’re talking about the National Guard dropping bombs on striking workers – the state and industry in collusion with each other. It feels like this area doesn’t matter, and the people in this area don’t matter. Once again, with this recent Debt Ceiling Deal, we’re seeing this with the MVP, Appalachia feels like a sacrifice zone. This is the thing that the Democrats and the politicians were willing to sacrifice so that they could pass this law. This goes all the way back to last summer, when they passed the Inflation Reduction Act. They, the Dems, cut this side deal with Joe Manchin, who’s pet project this seems to be, he also seems to get whatever he wants. They cut this side deal, so that they could pass this supposedly great environmental legislation, and this was what they were willing to sacrifice. They tried to slide it into all other kinds of laws since then. It didn’t work because people were fighting back, but the Debt Ceiling Deal with potential economic collapse on the horizon – this is how they finally got it through.
Appalachia is gonna see very few profits from this. Everyone talks about all the jobs that a pipeline is supposed to bring and that just isn’t real. We see who comes here to work on this pipeline. Local folks maybe get to work for private security. There are no people here who are getting good jobs from this pipeline. Not that that’s the only thing that matters here, but there’s just very clear collaboration between the state and these huge corporations to force this hazardous project through an area that doesn’t need it, most of which doesn’t want it either.
C: The local job line is a bunch of bullshit. Look at all these cars – they are out of town trucks. Maybe waitresses are making a little bit of more money now with tips or being busier, but, a friend at the gas station who’s now not getting a longer break, because they’re busier now, she’s still making the same bullshit wages as before. It’s not like she’s making more money there. This isn’t a long, sustainable income for this community, this region. What folks really do need is some better ideas – other than this.
TFSR: It seems comparable to the conversation when local governments are talking about building a new prison. Whatever it can bring, it might create jobs for members of the local community – for construction, but probably a lot of them aren’t gonna get as terrible job as a guard or administration at a prison job is. That promise is just dangled there, and it’s not even usually fulfilled in that manner. It does kind of bleed over into hotels and other service industry, like you mentioned, but also, there’s a lot of other negative consequences besides environmental ones. Man Camps, for example, that are related to the building of extractive facilities oftentimes, create a scenario where there’s an uptake in misogynist and sexual violence.
C: Well, and just displacing local people, because they bring their RVs here. I’ve already have a friend who can’t find a place to park her RV, which she lives out of (that was her retirement thing for herself). She’s staying with her daughter, because all the spaces around here are booked up to pipeliners. So they displace people too, and rent around here is so high right now. I’m sure rent prices are up everywhere, but especially in this area. Any available spaces are also now being taken up by these out-of-towners.
If I could just add on about long-term jobs. I have not read this book yet, but I was in a Zoom meeting with them, it’s called Coal, Cages, Crisis. The thing that was part of it – was talking about how in these communities, they are building a lot of jails, as the new economy. They give seniors in high school $1,000 bonus to join their CEO class or whatever. That’s pretty gross. We shouldn’t be building more jails and prisons to make the economy a better place. Sustainable real jobs, real investment. We know the money’s out there. It’s just they don’t want to in this area. As always, we’re gonna fight this pipeline, we’re gonna have to fight for everything for us in this area – and that’s jobs, our future, community, all that.
R: That’s a really important way to highlight the way we see this pipeline, and all fossil fuel extractive industry – tied to all these other issues and movements to be fighting: prisons, extraction, patriarchy, white supremacy, borders, capitalism, all of the bad things. Again, it really is about so much more than a pipeline.
TFSR: So assuming the capitalists’ hope was that this would catch activists and communities unaware, that they could just restart it and folks wouldn’t be able to organize themselves, can you talk a bit about the work of reinvigorating the resistance? This project has been on hold for a couple of years (if the last construction was happening in 2021). What does the process of re-energizing this look like?
C: The energy is out there. I’m just speaking from what I’ve seen. We’ve had a rally in DC in front of the White House and rode a bus from this area, and we got the news on the bus that they were given their 404 permit. These are people who have done everything “the right way”. I heard people say the only thing that’s left is civil disobedience, and I never thought I would hear some of these folks ever say that. Them attaching this to National Debt Ceiling has energized a certain group of people for who locking into equipment wasn’t their first choice. It was definitely doing the lobbying and all that stuff. I think by Biden basically fucking us has definitely re-energized some people. But I’ll let Rose talk more about what they’re hearing.
R: I think similarly, a lot of people are just really fired up locally, regionally, but also nationally, through this whole process of MVP being the side deal with Manchin. It also helps, the people that are so pissed at Joe Manchin. Suddenly this pipeline has caught national attention, because the way this has gone down is so fucked up. For some folks, like Crystal was saying, it is really a wake up call to the reality that this system that we have – the courts, the state – are not going to save us from these fossil fuel pipelines or from projects like this. They’re trying to be forced through communities. I think a lot of people are seeing that we’re going to have to stop this ourselves. It’s an important time to be reminding everyone that this is not over, that the courts were not the only way that this pipeline was being stalled for all these years.
C: On my end, I’m just trying to make space for everyone to be involved. Water monitoring, worksite training monitoring back in 2018 resulted in the MVP being fined $2.15 million for over 300 violations. Those were pictures taken and submitted by local people. They still have over the 600 water bodies, which just a couple of weeks ago was only 400 and some water bodies. So that was a lie. And now that they got their permit, it’s “oh, yeah, now it’s over 600”, including the Greenbrier River in West Virginia. I think there’s something special about that – maybe Rose can say. It’s never been messed with or bored under and it’s also pretty huge. But 75% of this route is through moderately higher flood risk areas, which have also have slid, since even before they’re doing construction. This is just in places that they’ve already buried pipe. There’s the real danger of this thing blowing up. People know the damage to their lives. Stopping this pipeline is about saving people’s lives also.
R: To your point on the rivers, the Greenbrier is definitely crucial, really amazing, beautiful river. It’s one of the only un-dammed rivers in the country. Their original plan was to dam a lot of these rivers to put the pipeline through. Now they’re going to drill under all the rivers. Again, we’re talking about putting a 42-inch pipeline under a major river. It doesn’t take an ecologist or a biologist or a scientist to think through that and to know that this is just a wildly terrible idea. A lot of the terrain also around here is karst terrain, which makes it in part susceptible to landslides. For folks who don’t know, karst basically means that the ground is filled with caves. And it’s also susceptible to sinkholes. The idea that there’s going to be a pipe in this area that is susceptible to sinkholes just feels so dangerous. If there had been gas running through this pipeline, it would have already exploded, and that feels important to know.
C: Let’s talk about the earthquakes that we’ve had here recently. We’ve had a couple lower magnitude earthquakes, but there’s still 2.5-2.8. That’s still sketchy. One just recently.
TFSR: I was driving through the area that you are talking about 6-7 months ago, and noted a lot of pipeline sitting stacked up in fields without tarps on it or anything like that. In the meantime, while this projects been on hold, was that MVP stuff that was just sitting in waiting? Is that a concern in terms of the safety of delivery? While this has been on pause, how have the pieces of pipe and the fittings and all these things been being stored? Is that a thing you can speak to? And is that a concern?
C: I can say it’s a huge concern. Just a couple of days ago, Mountain Valley Pipeline responded to that concerns with a letter to FERC, and it was 382 pages. I have not read it yet. They can’t make it simple. It was 382 pages going over their response to our concerns – it is chipping, there are raccoon living in this pipeline, the epoxy coating is peeling off of it. We’ve all taken pictures of that. These pipes were supposed to have been rotated – that’s a big lie – it has not happened. So that is a real concern. And apparently, there’s not much that PHMSA would do. They won’t even do anything until after an incident has happened.
R: Years ago they were saying, “We got to get this pipeline in the ground”. This started in 2018, so this pipe has literally been sitting out for almost six years, if not longer. They were saying “the pipe can’t sit out, we have to get it in the ground as fast as possible”. And now, years and years later, people are asking “what about the pipe that’s been sitting out?” And they’re saying, “Oh, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it”.
TFSR: So we’ve talked about some of the local fears of what might come out of this if the pipeline is built. Does anyone have stats or information concerning the wider impact outside of the area where the pipeline is? Like Crystal was talking about what’s going on in Cancer Alley…
C: There’s already people who don’t have drinking water in their house right now, because of this pipeline. I don’t know if that’s an answer. And it’s not even built. But I’ll let Rose go, and I’ll see what they say.
R: So outside of what’s going to happen locally… We could probably talk for another hour about what’s gonna happen if this pipeline is built. This pipeline is equivalent to 26 coal fired power plants, just back to our conversation about the marketing of natural gas and how it seems like it’s so much better than coal – these are the carbon emissions that we’re talking about. That is huge when we’re thinking about Climate Change, and the really serious impacts that we’re all already seeing. I imagine anyone listening to this right now can look out their window and be seeing smog from these wildfires. The way this is going to contribute to Climate Change is really serious and needs to be considered and clearly wasn’t considered. ”Oh, Congress passed this great environmental legislation”, but what were they willing to offer? – This pipeline, that’s gonna just make everything worse.
C: Yeah, I’ll add that it’s also adding 90 million new cars a year. Also recently, this is within the last two days, James Martin, the PhD chief of Gas Branch, three division of Gas, Environment and Engineering, wrote in a letter that Mountain Valley has estimated that over the operational life of the project up to 247.68 acres of trees associated with potential future slips (that’s what they call landslides) may need to be cleared.
Additionally, there are potentially impacts from future vegetation maintenance during operation. Because of these factors, Mountain Valley has determined that the project is likely to adversely affect the tricolored bat. FERC agrees with the analysis and conclusion of the biological assessment. So that’s another thing with the endangered species, they did say “No, they won’t be affected”, but now that they’ve gotten all their permits, its just like the over 600 waterways, now they’re saying ”Oh, yeah, we’ll probably gonna have to deforest another 300 acres. Oh, and that bat? Yeah, that’s probably gonna get fucked too”. It’s bullshit, it’s all coming to light now, things that we already knew. Now, they’re just saying it. I’m just gonna add that we really don’t know what the future outcome, of how much more damage it’s going to be, because it’s ongoing. We can’t really say, “We know it’s gonna be a lot, but probably more than what we think.”
R: Yes, for sure. As we see this project as a continuation of colonization, and we are, again, not just fighting for this pipeline, but for getting land back to indigenous people, it does feel important to note that the South Gate Extension of this pipeline is slated to go through Lumbee territory, and there’s been a lot of indigenous resistance to that section in particular. I just want to plug that piece as well, because it’s important.
TFSR: How can people that are interested in learning more and maybe getting involved in the resistance to the resumption of the Mountain Valley Pipeline construction, get involved and learn more? What sort of work is needed either locally or remotely?
R: Construction on this pipeline, since the Debt Ceiling Deal – it has started. The landscape suddenly looks very different, they are moving equipment, there are workers around everywhere. It’s happening, it’s very overwhelming, it’s very scary. We are definitely calling for people in this moment to come help us fight this pipeline on the ground, stop them with these waterways, stop them in the National Forest, stop them from coming through these mountains. So one way you can do that is to get in touch with us at appalachiansagainstpipelines@protonmail.com. If folks can’t make it – do solidarity actions where you are.
Crystal, do you have ways folks can see the list of investors? Is that posted somewhere easily accessible?
C: I know Third Act, which is a group of 60+ elders who have been giving the banks hell, getting arrested in the banks sitting in, they’re probably a good place to look at some good banks. Wells Fargo seems to be the main choice, I think it’s the top investor in this project. Is that correct?
R: I don’t think they’re the top investor, but I think they weigh in heavily, for sure. Definitely doing solidarity actions wherever you can in your own communities, just spreading the word about what’s happening here feels really important right now.
C: We did have some banner drops a couple of weeks ago, when we knew this was going through, right after the Debt Ceiling was signed, at Richmond, North Carolina, Virginia. The hashtag was #SaveAppalachia and #StopMVP. So folks, if you want to get creative and drop a banner somewhere, that’d be awesome. And share those pictures, so we can see them.
R: We’re also on social media, Appalachians Against Pipelines. It’s on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
TFSR: I’d love to hear more about this… This struggle is local to the area where the pipeline is being constructed, and the implications of it are global, but so is the network of corporations that are involved in the construction of this, the government agencies and individual politicians that are pushing this through. Also localized struggles like this are going on in all sorts of places that have these inter-meshing. Some of the same corporations that are involved in this are probably involved in pushing for the construction of Cop City, just south of so-called Atlanta. I wonder if you could talk about the place that the struggle against the Mountain Valley Pipeline sits in relation to other struggles against ecocide?
C: The Stop Cop City… I feel horrible for what’s going on down there, with Tortuguita and their mom, listening to her speak earlier on their last day of action down there – that’s just a horrible situation. I hope that’s nothing that we will have to face here, but that definitely has my heart hurting and I’m also nervous. I hate to be Debbie downer, but what’s happening down there with the youth… They killed them, that young person, and that’s nothing I hope ever happens again, ever.
I don’t know. I’m sorry.
R: Just thinking about indigenous-led resistance everywhere to similar projects like this. We think about Coastal Gaslink Pipeline that is trying to be forced through Wetsuwet’en land. It’s really important to be engaged and struggle against all projects like this, but, again, if you can’t travel – doing something in your own communities is important. Not just pipelines or so-called environmental work. Fighting against the prisons and the expansion of the police or rather the existence of the police and all of the things is really important.
TFSR: Crystal, Rose, unless you wanted to say anything else, I really appreciate you having this conversation and the work that you’re doing and taking the time to be in touch with me and answer these questions.
C: I think it’s great, I appreciate you for willing to talk with us and help us get this fight out. Because it’s gonna take a lot. To give some people even some rest… We’ve done great, but I’m telling you, folks, I fear for what is coming. I know, the summer is going to be long. And they’re working today, they’re working on a Saturday. This is going to be gung ho, they’re going to be gung ho talking bullshit, because they know, there’s nothing that can be done.
It makes me feel like the action with the helicopter. To tell you one of my favorite actions was the helicopter. They were seeding these hills, which the grass still hasn’t grown, because they threw seeds down on black tarp and I have pictures of that also. People were messaging me… They flew this helicopter for weeks, and in some places, two helicopters. I have pictures of them loading side by side. It’s constant noise. It’s draining on people, people are having to give their dogs anxiety pills now. That’s crazy. That day that someone had locked down to the helicopter, I remember feeling so good. Yeah, fuck their helicopter – not today. And that’s the feeling I want to go into this summer, just some of that empowerment. You’re driving us insane and we’re going to do the same for you today. Just getting in their way.
TFSR: I got a big smile, just hearing you say that. That’s great. Fuck your helicopter and we’re going to be in your way.
C: Just being able to get on the security’s nerves, because they act all big and bad. I remember just telling the security: “So you just let someone run by you and lock down to a helicopter? What kind of job are you doing?”, just ragging on him for letting somebody lock down to a helicopter. It was also a lot of bullshit and they were fined, a good amount of money, and that helicopter was back up the next day. There was nothing wrong with the helicopter, I got pictures of it . That day, they also chose to try to have a drone war with somebody on our side who had a drone up. There’s a video of that on Appalachians Against Pipelines. I don’t know if it was MVP or if it was the state police but they were definitely going after the drone that was up in the air, making sure that the person on the helicopter was okay. So it was an eventful day. It was probably one of my most memorable actions.
Here we are presenting Ian’s interview with members of Strangers In a Tangled Wilderness, a collectively run publisher of radical podcasts, fiction, zines, games, and much more. We discuss the kickstarter fundraiser the group just launched to fund their tabletop RPG, Penumbra City, their history with games and with each other, world building, the value of goal-free play, and how it might be applied to projects and organizing. You can watch a playthrough of the game on youtube.
TFSR: So as it stands now, the Kickstarter, which launched at the beginning of June is standing at around $37,000 with 19 days to go! So, congratulations on that, obviously.
Can you all introduce yourselves, share your pronouns, your affiliations and maybe talk a little bit about how this came together?
Margaret Killjoy: Yeah. Am I going first? Someone else go first.
Inman: You’re already talking, so…
MK: All right. My name is Margaret. Margaret killjoy. I use she or they pronouns and, I, along with the other two people on this call are part of Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness, which is an anarchist publishing collective that is putting out a tabletop role playing game called Penumbra City that is currently being Kick Started. I’m going to pass it to Robin.
Robin: Hi, I’m Robin, I’m the artist for Penumbra City. I’m excited to be here. Can I pass to Inman?
I: Hi, I’m Inman, I use they/them pronouns. I’m the Game Designer for Penumbra City. So if the game doesn’t work when you play it, you can blame me… Or if you’re not having fun, you can blame me. [laughs]
R: If you are not having fun, then you’re doing it wrong. Also, I use she/her pronouns. Sorry, I left that part out.
MK: The background of Penumbra City is that a long time ago I was hired to write a game world for a universal game system by a different publisher. I wrote this whole crazy-big city world called Penumbra City that I put a lot of work into. It was like 40 or 50,000 words of world that I wrote, which is almost as long as… well, it’s longer than many of the books I’ve written. Then that publisher disappeared. This was about 10 years ago. They just collapsed and ghosted everyone. I had already done the work and I never got paid.
So, I had this world without a mechanical system just sitting around for a very long time. I spent a long time kind of trying to toss together different game systems to go with this game world. I tried figuring out if I could adapt it to Dungeons and Dragons, or Powered By The Apocalypse. We tried a couple other different systems. Me and my friends and a bunch of people play tested the early versions of it who also really liked the world. Then I started working with Robin and Inman, a number of years ago now on what is the current version. I would say the current version has probably been in progress for three or four years as well. I just got really lucky finding a bunch of people. Cassandra is also part of the group that is working on it too, but isn’t able to make to this particular interview.
So after several years of work, we Kick Started it on June 1. It has been more successful than we could have hoped. I think people are excited about role playing strange gang war versus the Immortal God King in a collapsing society. I actually think in a lot of ways the timing is better now than it would have been like four years ago, because there’s a little bit more on the nose now about a society that is increasingly polarized, and people attempting to come together to change everything and make things better.
TFSR: Can you talk a little bit about your experiences in relationships to gaming, how you got together, and how your experiences and relationships informed bringing this game together?
I: Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. I know that Margaret and Robin have a little bit of a deeper history with this game than I do and in general. Actually, Robin, maybe you should start and then I’ll catch up where I come in.
R: Well, are we talking about our relationship to Penumbra or our relationship to gaming in general?
TFSR: I’d like to hear about your relationship to gaming in general, and then maybe zoom in on Penumbra?
R: Ok, yeah! In terms of my relationship to gaming in general… when I was a little kid my sister had the whole ‘80s Dungeons & Dragons module on the box. I was so fascinated with it. Then there were all these ‘80s Satanic Panic news pieces about how Dungeons & Dragons is evil and it’s making kids bad. That made me even more curious about it. My cousin and I were trying to find it and looking under her bed and digging through her old stuff and going into the basement trying to find the D&D stuff. It was like this object of mystery to me. I did eventually inherit that box from her and I still have it in my house. It’s missing half of the shit that it’s supposed to have in it. But it’s just a fun keepsake that I’ve had now for the rest of my life.
I started playing D&D with my cousins when I was probably like 12 or 13 years old. Although, at that age, we were really difficult to organize. So it never really stuck. Then when I was in high school I had a more regular gaming group. That was still mostly Dungeons and Dragons. We didn’t start branching out into different styles of role playing until we were a little bit older.
Margaret and I have been friends since we were in high school. I remember at one point, I think when we were both home visiting our parents for Christmas and she called me up and she was like, “Do you want to come play an RPG [Role Playing Game] in my parents basement?” and I was like, “Hell yeah!” So the two of us have been on and off playing together for quite a long time. So when we had the opportunity to make something like this together that is fun and exciting, because Margaret and her writing always really inspires me and makes me excited and makes me want to create. And then Inman has been able to not only add to the lore and help us develop this really amazing thing, but has also just made it just so functional and smooth and easy to do.
MK: Yeah! I’ve been playing D&D and other RPGs for about 30 years now which makes me feel old as hell. I started playing in fourth grade with my friends stepdad as the DM [Dungeon Master] in the basement of his house. The first time I ran a game that was also probably in fourth grade or something like that. These are some of the strongest memories I have of this age of my life. I did not have a particularly easy time socially. See the aforementioned hiding-in-the-basement-playing-Dungeons-&-Dragons.
Then I had a gaming group in fourth and fifth grade and by the time I went to middle school, my best friends moved away. So then I just started reading gaming books. That was like my primary… Well I read everything, but I read an awful lot of game books. I really just liked reading encyclopedias about fake worlds. I think what actually set up a lot of my expectations around what kind of creative stuff I like producing, was just realizing that the envisioning of these worlds is its own amazing thing.
I played off and on a little bit in high school and played with Robin a little bit, but it kind of fell out of it. I got back into it while I was living in a squat and Amsterdam and this super tough Anti Fascist skinhead friend of mine who I lived with, who spent all of his time lifting weights and fighting Nazis, he comes up to my room, and he’s like, “Magpie! Do you want to play D&D with me?” And I’m like, “Are you? Are you making fun of me? Did you come up here to make fun of me?” And he’s like, “No, a player dropped out. I need a new player for my campaign!” So I started getting back into playing Dungeons & Dragons. The whole time, also, I was playing Shadow-run and Vampire and some of the other games.
I came back to the states and then I just started making all my friends play role playing games with me. I used to be the ‘Forever DM’ until I tricked Inman into becoming the ‘Forever DM’ and now Inman is the ‘Forever DM,’ or a ‘Game Master’ now, because when you play not D&D, you’re not supposed to call it DM.
Then you know, all this time, I also had these other games I was working on. This isn’t the first game system or game world I’ve written. This is probably number three or four. But this is the good one. This is the one that’s worth publishing. All the others are like weird zines that may or may not be floating around the world. Like one of them’s called ‘Gray World,’ and I don’t remember anything about it.
I: I have always wanted to play RPGs or games in general. I was aware of these games when I was a kid, but I didn’t have friends to play them with. So, I just spent a lot of time running around in the woods like LARPing by myself and eventually started reading game books as well. I was like, “I don’t have people to play these games with because I barely have friends at all, so I’m just gonna read these games!” It’s funny because I think we think of nerd culture sometimes as where you are alone playing these things. But in order to play these games you need other people who feel alone to play them with. So I just read game-books until I was like 22 or something. I had been flirting with D&D for a long time, and someone was like, “I’ll run a campaign!” And I was like, “Great!” And I read the entire game book and come up with 10 characters, and then it would fall through.
Then Margaret, when we were both living in Asheville invited me to play in her D&D campaign. So that was the first time that I was actually playing D&D. It was immediately everything that I wanted it to be. I just started to GM because Margaret kind of stopped. And I was like, “I want to do this. But the only way that I’m going to be able to do it is if I learn how to run games.”
I ran a lot of really bad games for a while, but got really invested in learning it. Me and Margaret eventually started playing D&D Again, where she was playing in some of my games that I was running. We started to talk about game mechanics a lot and started to talk about the limitations of D&D, which is what we were mostly playing. I think I had just listened to Critical Roll or something and I was like, “How do I make this my job?” Margaret was like, “Well, do I have a project for you?” So I started to get involved with Penumbra City. I have done some game development on smaller games in the past, also, through Margaret. We wrote a weird game based on Honey Heist for her novel *Escape From Incel Island.
MK: You wrote a game, basically.
I: I wrote a game. Sorry. I wrote a game based on Margaret’s book. So, since getting involved with Penumbra… it’s just like this huge world. Margaret wrote the base for the game mechanics and in coming in, it’s been this fun work of cleaning them up, because they were really messy and trying to make it hold the original feeling that she created, but make it run a little bit smoother!
R: Inman, it’s so hard for me to imagine a version of you that’s not experienced running a game, because every time you run a game for us, we have such a delightful time and you structure this really beautiful experience. Even if we go completely off the rails, you just run with it and make sure that we have the best time.
I: Okay, Margaret was there for my first time running a game and it was like three sessions. I had played D&D three sessions as a player and I was like, “I want to run a game!” So I ran it for me and Margaret’s D&D group. It was like the off week game or something and the players immediately got through the thing that I had spent six hours planning in like 20 minutes. I froze. I had no idea what to do. Nothing made any sense and I was like, “The session is over because I know what happens next.”
R: Oh, no! But then in contrast to that, if you watch the YouTube or you listen to the podcast we just recorded of our play-through. You created such a fun experience and battle that was totally, really epic, rewarding and emotional. So that’s incredible and good for you!
I: Aw, thanks.
R: Oh, my gosh, wait, I also I wanted to say that another fun role playing story is that my nephew got his first role playing module for Christmas a couple years ago when I was visiting with my sister and her kids. He wanted it so bad and so then he read it in an afternoon and was like, “I’m gonna run a game for you guys!” And it was like that. It was like, “Oh, you should definitely try to put this helmet on your head. Do it! Do it! Do it!” It’s just clear that he’s trying to lead us towards something that he planned out really well. But then when things didn’t quite go the way he planned. He was like, “Oh, no. Let’s try this again later.” But it was still really very cute and fun.
TFSR: That’s awesome. So it sounds like Penumbra City was born from the world that Margaret wrote up in that initial document. Can you talk about how game design for something like this begins, and how this game system is similar or different to what’s out there?
MK: I can talk about how it started. From my point of view, game systems have developed a lot in the past, well only 10 years, but certainly in the past 30 years. There’s a lot of different styles of gaming and I sometimes get the different names of simulationist versus story versus… there’s like a third one or something. I get those mixed up. But from my point of view, the original version of this game had instead of a class based system, it had a skill based system. So it had this thing where any character can take any different abilities and you have different ability pools and skills, and all of these things, and you build these characters. There’s a certain realism to that style of gaming. But I find personally that I’m not as attracted to it.
I prefer class based games. I prefer games that have discrete categories of character, because I think that the archetypical characters are part of what define a game and make the game unique and describable and enjoyable. So even if in some ways it limits the realism or something, but I don’t always need realism when I’m summoning demons or whatever. So that was how it ended up building towards a class based game.
There were a lot of decisions in the early stuff. Inman and I talked about this and I was talking about this with other people, too, as I was working on this initial version I was very inspired by the old school Renaissance. The OSR style of gaming, which is an attempt to simplify, essentially, Dungeons & Dragons. A lot of that stuff uses the same like six ability scores and uses a lot of the same fantasy archetypes and stuff, but it doesn’t have to be that. A lot of people have done a lot of work simplifying the mechanics of the game to make it more streamlined and more playable.
It shows that Dungeons & Dragons actually comes out of ‘Wargaming’, not ‘Roleplaying,’ right? It created role playing as we understand it, but it started off as people who played with miniatures, where they were having battles, and it was literally just about battles. But the way that people want to interact with this style of game tends to be a little bit different now. I also think it’s telling that role playing is having a golden age, a new golden age or whatever, where a lot more people are playing these games and a lot more ideas are being developed.
And so, we took a lot of the things from the ‘Old School Renaissance style,’ especially the simplified mechanics of it. One thing that I personally was inspired by *’Powered By The Apocalypse, which is another style of game was the idea of having (I actually think some OSR games have this too,) but where the players roll all the dice instead of the Game Master. In Dungeons & Dragons, if an enemy tries to hit you, the Game Master will roll a die and see if they hit you. Whereas in Penumbra City (and in a lot of other more modern games) if a monster tries to hit you, you roll to see if you dodge it instead. That puts a lot more agency into the hands of characters and it makes combat a little bit more engaging for the players and I think keeps things moving a little bit faster, even if mechanically you kind of have to build around that problem.
That’s where I made a big mess of it and then I handed it off to Inman, much like I’m handing off this part of talking about it.
I: Where I mostly came in, at first, was cleaning up the class systems that Margaret had mostly outlined already. I feel like a lot of my my job went into cleaning things up trying to normalize abilities across classes and create some kind of homogeneous structure to things. It’s funny, because for a while, we kept describing the game as this ‘rules-light’ game. At some point I was like, “This is not a rules-light game. You have to do a little bit of homework.” So we made this base of having this really simplified basic mechanics system.
One of the big troubles that I’ve had engaging new players in tabletop RPGs in the past has been, they’re like, “Okay, wait, what modifier do I add to what role to do this thing?” And you end up doing a whole bunch of math you end up having to reference where you’re getting modifiers and bonuses from a lot. I think that it directs people around this power gaming mentality of like, “How do I min/max my character to be the most efficient or the most effective.
Something that we tried really hard with the class abilities in Penumbra City is to say, “Yes, this game is more than ‘I attack this thing with my sword'” or like, “This game is more than ‘I dodged something,'” but trying to build in some narrative element to those class abilities. It’s really simple to swing a sword at something, but one of the class abilities is walking the ethereal plane and you have to like learn about the ethereal plane in order to do that. So we just really wanted to make these abilities that were really fun and really engaging for a character to be able to do in and out of combat. There’s character abilities that are like, “I know a guy,” and it just means that like your character knows an NPC [non-player character], and it brings the narrative into the hands of the characters in these small ways, which is something that I’ve grown really attracted to in a lot of modern RPGs is giving the players more narrative control.
So, that’s kind of what we hoped our mechanics system could do. Combat is really simple and easy but you might have to learn about how fungal magic works.
TFSR: In the materials on the Kickstarter you describe this development team as queer radical and proudly neurodivergent. Can you speak to any ways in which those qualities informed the design and maybe even the setting of Penumbra City?
MK: Yeah. It goes through all of it pretty thoroughly, right? And a lot of it isn’t conscious. The thing that I’ve come across, for example, when I write books is that people will be like, “Oh, wow, there’s all these queer characters in this book!” And I’m like, “I didn’t do that on purpose. I just put my friends in the book.” And not all my friends are queer, but like an awful lot of them are.
The same with neurodivergence. I think that everyone sees the world in very different ways and I think that role playing is a really good way to represent all of the different ways that we see the world. To try and create a little consensus reality among your friends and engage with that is a fun exercise from a consciousness point of view. So we want to represent characters that see the world in different ways. In a weird way, the queerness is not… everyone who is making the game is queer. There are no cis-men involved in the making of the game at the moment. That wasn’t like a rule. There’s four of us. Two of us are women and two of us are non binary.
The radical elements are baked in more obviously. One of the mechanical systems that we have is that there’s no money in the world of Penumbra City. Money has lost its meaning and the city is running on reputation as it collapses/falls into revolution. I think that this is one of the more… there are games that have reputation systems, but rarely are they reputation economics. That’s not because we’re not attempting to prefigure a world where you only get your stuff if you know people, right? But instead we are just trying to describe a world that is completely different than the one that we live in now.
I think that it is like actually very useful for people to figure out ways to think about solving problems instead of accumulating wealth in order to buy the bigger and more expensive sword in order to fight the dragon. In Penumbra City, if there was a dragon (there’s no dragons in it currently, but I’m not saying they’ll never be a dragon in it) but if a dragon comes you might have to instead unite all the gangs.
I think that is a more realistic way to deal with problems, rather than have four people, four adventurers, go save the world. But you run into this mechanical and story problem where you need characters have agency. This is a problem that has existed in D&D for a long time. It harkens back to Tolkien, for example. You can’t play the ‘Ride of the Rohirrim’ in D&D. You could, but it’s rare that these four players are going to turn the tide of a battle because there’s 1000’s of people on each side. That’s always been this thing that D&D or other role playing games, (not all of them. I’m sure some of them do it great and I’m not trying to be like ‘we’re the best in the world’ but I obviously like our game) but how do we actually go around and get the Riders of Rohan to get ready to go ride off into battle? That’s the story you can tell with four people. Actually, I mean, Tolkien does that.
So I think our radical politics, they come up in more obvious ways, like several of the factions are anarchist factions, several of the factions are republican factions, and several other factions that you can play are centrists or whatever. We did make a decision, Inman actually was the one who came up with this and it was brilliant, when we first started trying to write the game. I’ll let Inman tell this instead of me going on about it.
I: The game, when I came on to it was, it still is, but it was this three way battle between these different coalition’s. The revolutionists, which is pretty obvious, the reasonable, which is maybe also pretty obvious… the centrists of the game, then the bulwark, which is the authority or the establishment of the game. You could play as any character. There were factions and playable classes for all three of these coalitions. You might have a party that’s made up of someone from the revolutionists, someone from the weird capitalists, someone from the authority or the establishment.
When I started to try to write adventure content around this, I ran into a lot of problems. Because in other games in a class based game, if you’re playing a knight or a Paladin, you could be a knight or a Paladin of whoever. With the Penumbra City, it was like, “You’re an anarchist knight and you have a history with this group.” That suddenly became more complicated to streamline narratives around. I think that version of the game will exist someday. But for now, I ran into a roadblock where I was like, “What if we made the narrative about the revolutionists? What if the game was told from the perspective of the revolutionists and we entirely shifted the dynamic of the game to be this more neutral three way battle, to you are playing a revolutionist and you are trying to throw down the God King or whatever.” A lot of things kind of clicked into place after that.
Margaret had been writing some narrative stuff that was from the perspective of one of the anarchist factions and that became the game voice for the book. So now we have these easy narrators for the world through shifting the perspective of how players are engaging with it. You can still play as a couple people or classes from the different coalitions. We are trying to slowly introduce this dynamic that you can play as whoever, you can have these mixed reputation parties that don’t always have the same goals in mind. But we’re doing it in a much smaller way than we were before.
TFSR: Did you design the game with a certain kind of player in mind as a rules-light, it seems to have been designed to be accessible for beginners and players with less experience. That makes me wonder what kind of outcomes you envision for a successful play experience. From an anarchist perspective, I wonder to what degree it was conceived with instructive outcomes and qualities in mind. I think you spoke to that a little bit, but I wonder if you might elaborate further?
MK: Show me what you mean by instructive, in this case.
TFSR: I guess I mean imparting anarchist values.
MK: I think a lot about how the narratives that we tell impart values onto the world. I think a lot about the role of writing as propaganda. I also am a little bit nervous around that. I think one of my goals as an anarchist and as a fiction writer (they dovetail very well) which is to not tell people what to do or think. There’s always that complicated game of, “Well, I want everyone to think for themselves and end up ideologically aligned with me.” It’s the messy tension that anarchists have to have to consider. So, I think that the fact that the game is played from the perspective of the revolutionists is important. I want anarchist values to be some of the those that are available.
But I do also personally want to make sure that the players aren’t railroaded into that. You can play a game where it’s not about overthrowing the God King, or you can play from the point of view of someone who wants to overthrow the God King and create something that is like more traditionally Democratic or whatever. I’m not going to give people the instructions of how to play a game where you end up with a Stalin or something. There is not an authoritarian communist faction currently in the game. Although I guess that would be realistic. So maybe eventually there should be something that’s kind of like that.
But I do think that the process of co-envisioning something with a group of people, I think there’s an inherent radical value in tabletop role playing games, in co-imagining things. I think that the adventuring party very closely relates to the affinity group, the model that is traditionally used by anarchists for revolutionary purposes. I think that the fact that role playing games, if you play them well, you prioritize fun instead of rules, right? The rules are there for a reason and following them can make the game more playable and enjoyable. But at the end of the day, it is up to the people playing to do what they actually want. So on some level, rules are always guidelines. I think that is a valuable thing to impart upon people.
In terms of the ideal player, we talked about this a lot, actually in our internal conversations, how we can try and get this game to be playable by new people. That is actually a very hard thing. It is a very hard thing. Tabletop role playing game traditionally is passed on from a player to a player. It is not traditionally passed on by people picking up the book cold and starting to play. That is something that we are working to try and include in the game. I do think that you’re right. ‘Rules-light’ does lend itself to that, although we are now ‘rules-medium’ so, who knows?
TFSR: If nobody has anything else to add to that, I would like to know, in the course of designing this game, what were some of the hang ups and the pitfalls that you you all went through. I’m not sure who all among you would count yourselves as organizers, but I suspect that you’ll have some organizing experience. I was wondering if you could draw any parallels between the collaborations involved in game design and the work of organizing?
I: I’m going to put Margaret on the spot with something that she says a lot, but I think has been really good at. I think kind of like organizing, when you start a project, when you get really attached to it, there can be some kind of inherent dynamic to control it or shape it or guide it. This hasn’t been a problem because we have been involved in anarchist organizing before. We have this thing that Margaret did a lot of the work of creating the container for. Since then we have consensus meetings, we make decisions through consensus. For example, I’m coordinating the game rules, but that all affects stuff that Margaret does, or when Margaret writes something that affects how a game mechanic works, or if we introduce a different element that might shift how Robin envisions the artwork for the game. It’s this collaborative effort that affects all of us, all of our jobs affect each other.
I think that being involved in anarchist organizing helped create that container where we all have this, at this point, equal investment in the project and we’re all like telling these stories inside this container and making decisions together based on that. Margaret jokes about having founder syndrome a lot. But I think that she does a really awesome job of letting go of that in the service of a collaborative effort. I think is the root of anarchist organizing is collaboration. People taking on tasks to hyper focus on them instead of controlling them. That’s been really a fun thing about this project.
TFSR: This may be a little bit of a detour, but can you go into what a decision being brought up at a consensus meeting… what that looks like?
MK: Ours is fairly informal. It’s four of us. We organize together, we are also all four members of Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, the anarchist publishing collective. We’re not the entirety of that collective, but we’re actually majority of it. There are six people in Strangers at the moment. We have a meeting structure and we also talk informally outside of those meetings, and try to keep everyone abreast of what was talked about, especially if it was talked about behind closed doors. We’ll run into something… we’ll talk about the way to represent people visually. A big thing that Robin brings to the table is a lot of experience with representing different kinds of people in illustration and we’ll talk about, “What are the pros and cons of this?” But we also kind of trust Robin, at the end of the day, as more of the expert on that kind of thing. So we all come in and our opinions are a little bit weighted by the thing that we’re kind of in charge of. But we can lose, right? Like I can lose a world design decision if I’m the world designer.
But by and large, this has been a really fun project, because it comes up, that we will have different ideas about how to do things, but usually we have different ideas more about, frankly, honestly, the the act of publishing and the bureaucratic side of it. It is is actually more complicated as compared to the creative side of it, which is a lot more like ‘yes, and…’ energy. Where someone’s going to be like, “Oh, I have an idea.” I think then the thing that behooves me, if I’m the world designer, I get almost ultimate say, but not actual ultimate say on world design decisions, right, but if someone has an idea, if if my first reaction is, “No, that’s not what I personally envisioned, so fuck off.” That is a bad way to have consensus decision making in a creative project. What we each try to do, and I know that this whole interview was us talking about how we just all get along great, but it’s like been pretty good and I love everyone I work with.
I’m probably the most obstinate person in the group. But worked very hard on if someone’s like, “That’s a little awkward. What if it was like this?” or, “Hey, I had this great idea that really flushes out this kind of character that’s been a little bit lacking.” It behooves me to take seriously that suggestion, and run it through in my head, different permutations of, “Does that work?” I might have to come back and be like, “Oh, that doesn’t really work, because it conflicts with this idea that the murder cranes…” There’s Murder Cranes in the game. They’ve been kicked out of the swamps by the fact that the war is destroying all the ecosystem and now they’re moving into the city and it causes some problems). But it’s like “Oh, if this doesn’t play with the way that I’ve been building this, then that might not work. But instead, I look to see, “Can this work? Can this fit?”
Some of this comes from my organizing background. But honestly, I hate organizing. I used to do it a lot and now I’m glad I mostly do creative projects. Creative organizing is a really similar process,
I: I would be super interested to hear how that has been for Robin, in distilling game world stuff or game design stuff into into artwork?
R: I think that got us this class is a really good example of that. Because originally, we had a game world that envisioned the idea of someone that summons demons and Margaret had written specific demons and what they looked like regarding how powerful they were more and more like very specifically what they did, and what they look like, and how they functioned. Then I was just drawing this thing and I went off the rails and I was looking at all these owl skulls. And I was like, what if what if you could just make it whatever you want, though? What if it’s a demonic presence but then you you just build a body for it out of scraps. Then it can be whatever you want. Then the player can just imagine whatever thing they like. Then I kind of just drew the thing and everyone was like, “Oh, we like that!”
Then Inman wrote an adventure where that monster was the big bad of the whole thing. So we were able to inform each other and collaborate on making something that engages player creativity also. I was excited that I made something that everybody else got excited about, even though I kind of went off the rails of what I was technically supposed to do in the moment.
I: Yeah, you had this beautiful idea around the goeticist having to scavenge all this organic material whatever to piece something together? I love that we’re putting the game out there now but I really have appreciated and loved those funny conversations where it’s been like, “Oh, how will this world design thing affect how Robin draws something?” and how the game mechanics function and finding that they’re all intertwined pretty heavily.
R: Yeah, we’ve definitely have had a lot of elaborate conversations about guns and how guns work, because that is not a thing that I know how to do. Fortunately, that’s something that Margaret knows a lot about. So I spent some really late nights panicking and telling her like, “Well, what about this?” And she was like, “No, you have to make it different. It has to look like this. This part has to go over here.” And I was like, “Oh God, I don’t understand guns and they kind of scare me.”
MK: It’s for the best.
R: The idea of making a steam powered motorcycle, which was originally part of the whole thing, and then we were talking to somebody who was like, “If you had to make something like that, it would be so tremendous that it would be unmanageable in size.” And we were like, “Okay, so how do we make something that looks like that, but also just kind of functions in a magical realism sort of way?” That’s probably also the only time Margaret has ever said to me, “Can you make it more like something out of an anime?”
MK: That’s true. That’s not my usual design choice.
R: I think you literally sent me a picture of cloud on his motorcycle for Final Fantasy VII and was like, “Make it like this,” or, “Make it like Akira. Make it like bigger and chunkier and fantasy anime motorcycle!” Because I was looking at old vintage motorcycles from the 20s through the 40s. I was like, “Oh, these are all really interesting.” It’s just like, “No, not big enough!” We wound up making something that was way more fun to draw, but I wasn’t really there yet. So it was nice to have.
I don’t I don’t tend to get too hung up on how something looks. I think I would have really dug my heels in on the owl monster if everyone was like, “We hate it.” I would say, “Too bad!” We’ve all had to kill some of our darlings to get here.
I: The owl monster is currently the image of the game, or it was until you finished the cover. But that was always the image we used and now you can’t even play a goeticist in this version of the game, which is really funny.
I: There is other really good stuff too!
R: A goeticist isn’t in one of our recently unlocked classes. Oh, no. Why did I think that it was?
MK: Maybe we will secret stretch goal it.
When we ran the Kickstarter, one of the things that we added was stretch goals. Basically, can this pay us enough to put in even more time to make more playable classes, because one of the things that happened in the beginning is we wrote 19 or 20 playable classes, and it was just too much to manage. It was also overwhelming our play testers. We had to do a lot of play testing on this game. It wasn’t just that it’s too much for us to manage balance of but literally players would be picking up the book and being like, “There’s too much. I don’t know.”
I: That was actually one of our funny roadblocks. I think one of our bigger disagreements: The amount of classes.
MK: To anyone who’s listening who’s like, “Oh, man, I don’t know about creative collaboration artist.” I’m someone who likes to work by myself in a lot of my projects. But we actually just do do better things in groups and I say this as someone who’s an introvert who avoids people on a regular basis. I think that this is true in role-play and it is true in creative projects and is absolutely true when literally trying to make the world a better place. We actually just do better when we work with other people and when we collaborate and when we learn how to let other people get their way sometimes about things that we are doing.
TFSR: That brings me to my next question here. What did play testing look like and how did you run through those iterations and implement the changes in a way that was manageable?
I: I guess I’ll talk about this because it was my job. I’m going to approach this with a small amount of shame. Play testing has been a lot of different things. There was an early part of play testing that was every week I would wrangle some people together and we called it stat bashing. Which was just the numbers and the math system. I would just get some players and I’d be like, “Okay, here’s your pre generated characters sheets, you’re fighting this.” We would just run combat after combat after combat to see how the balance was working with all the dice and the numbers and stuff. We would adjust things based on that, like the amount of hit points players had, or the amount of hit points monsters had or how much damage an ability does.
Then we wanted to move into a more complete version of testing, where we were giving players the game and essentially being like, “Run with it. Figure out adventures to run. Just just try stuff.” We got a lot of interest in it. I think there were 50 different play test groups at one point, all with four to eight players. There were literally a few 100 people play testing the game.
We got a lot of initial feedback that led us to believe that we were going to need to do a large restructuring of the game. So that version of the play-testing kind of ended pretty early in comparison to what it was supposed to do because there were all of this immediate feedback, like, “The game needs to be less overwhelming.” We need to change these larger elements of it. The play-testing for that ended pretty early because we just had this immediate sense of ‘big change.’
MK: I will say though, that a lot of those people really liked the game. We didn’t hear, “Oh, to hell with this game!” We heard a lot of people being like, “We are really excited about lots of pieces of this and are struggling to figure out how to put all the pieces together.” One of the thing that we’ve been dealing with with Penumbra City is that it’s almost like more people are excited about than we expected. We ended up with that many play testers because we put an open call out for play testers and we had a lot of people who were really interested. It exceeded our expectations. I’m trying to spin this around to point out that it’s actually going really well. It’s just hard to catch up.
TFSR: So, not to box in this world that you created, but the setting, from a sort of an uninitiated perspective, strikes me as an iteration of steampunk. I wonder if can you talk about what appeals to you both aesthetically and as it relates to the goals of the game, of the setting that you created. Generally, what I’m describing, a steampunk world, seems to strike me as a very delineated by class perspective. I wonder what you wanted to add or subtract from the genre when you’re making this game?
MK: We actually are not describing this game as steampunk anymore. There are obviously steampunk elements to it, right? The empire… well, not really an empire, but the the giant evil army or whatever is fighting with coal powered machinery. Obviously, it is a fantasy set at around the turn of the century in terms of the technological level. So there are certainly elements of that.
The very beginning of the game, when I was asked to do a world (I used to be fairly involved in steampunk and I’m kind of no longer involved in steampunk as a subculture or an aesthetic thing as much as I used to be) someone asked me to do a steampunk world and I was like, “Well, can it be my like ‘to hell with steampunk’ world instead? Can it be my ‘this is what I dislike about everything about steampunk, and this is what it should have been?'” They were like, “Yeah, please do that.” But in the time that has gone, the 10 years since, I would say that a lot more of the aesthetic vibe we’re going for is like Weimar Germany. The period in the 1920s when Germany was a republic, that was incredibly impoverished, and was a very polarized space with a lot of different factions, including anarchists and communists, as well as obviously fascist.
R: Also, notably pretty queer, right?
MK: Yeah, absolutely. So that is that is more the vibe that we’ve been going for with this iteration of the game.
There are some things that I think steampunk could have been. I think that steampunk could have been and started off in many ways as a critique. In the same way that Cyberpunk is a critique of giant global capitalist organizations that run the world and a celebration of the people who live in the cracks of that kind of society and fight against it. That is the idealized form of cyberpunk. Instead, the actual cyberpunk world we’re moving towards is the people celebrating the giant corporations. I think steampunk got a similar thing, where it started off, I believe, as a critique of colonialism, and a critique of the Industrial Revolution, and a critique of a lot of things that were happening in the world at the turn of the century. To kind of say that it’s not the place where society went off the rails, but it’s a really interesting pivotal place in history and it could have gone a lot of different ways. I think steampunk tried to imagine other ways it could have gone, or to celebrate the people fighting for other ways that it could have gone.
So I think that part of it does still come in through this game. This period in history in this place in a fantasy world where things could really actually change and this world has been stagnant for a very long time. The God Kings have been ruling for about 1000 years and playing the sort of eternal game of chess using everybody as pawns and there’s this moment (to make it more Weimar Germany, the pawn revolts – just some reference to something that Weimar Era filmmaker said once but I can’t remember where) it is the pawns revolt, the thing that we are describing. I’m kind of curious, you other two, your take on it. I don’t know I got weird feelings about steampunk.
I: What does that been like for for you, Robin, with developing the art and stuff?
R: I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t sound kind of negative. But I feel like when Margaret and I were talking about this initially, a long time ago, and she was much more deeply involved in steampunk, we were like, “Yeah, this is fun!” Then at some point, when we reinvigorated this project a couple years ago, we were like, “Oh, that aesthetic seems really tired and questionable,” and we just wanted to move on from that and we just both felt like we wanted to move on from that idea. But I guess I’m just not saying it in as diplomatic of a way as she does, as is typical every fucking day of our lives. I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to swear.
TFSR: I think it’s okay. I think Bursts can fix it.
R: I think we just we were like, “Oh, it’s been done before,” and it definitely just now evokes a feeling of a parody of itself. Margaret’s always been good at getting me down these rabbit holes of research and wonder and interest. So when we started talking about Weimar Germany, the Spanish Civil War was another one, and all of these eras of resistance and revolution and I think we started building more off of the aesthetics of that. Again, like we said before, leaning into more of the idea of fantasy tech than like Steam tech. Talking about different engines and things like that.
I: You didn’t want to just slap some gears on it and call it a day?
R: I absolutely don’t want to do that.
MK: yeah. [laughs]
R: Every character class in this is going to be girl with a short fluffy crinoline, and a corset, a top hat, and striped stockings and a monocle that is also gear.
TFSR: Can you try to situate this game in relation to the larger Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness project? How does it dovetail with the broader goals of the collective? Or doesn’t it?
I: I think it does. I feel like one of our missions at Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness is that… obviously a lot of our lives are influenced by theory, the things that we read, and philosophy and stuff. But I feel like one of the big goals of Strangers is to create or curate these pieces of literature or writing or art or whatever that try to imagine more narrative and culture based ways of talking about things anarchistically, instead of writing a book about anarchy theory or whatever. We want to imagine these worlds that are influenced by these values.
I think that Penumbra City actually dovetails very nicely into that project, it is a place of imagining, it is a place of exploration, and allows people to, in a way that a lot of other games don’t, allows players to be like, “Okay, yes, we’re in this anarchistic world, that has elements of like anarchism in it and we need to figure out how to get by, we need to figure out how to survive in this world.” I mean, we do a podcast called “Live Like the World is Dying,” we do a lot of game content now and we put out a lot of pieces that talk about prefiguring the world and stuff. So Penumbra City, is in a way, a synthesis of a lot of the things, the larger projects of Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.
R: That was really well said.
I: Oh, thanks. It’s funny to talk about a project that’s been around for like 19 years, or something, that I’ve been involved with for a couple of years. So I hope that was an accurate way to describe it.
R: Don’t underplay your involvement in it. You’ve been so instrumental in shaping it to the most ideal version of itself. We would not be where we are without you. I love that you tie the whole thing back to… I think that you’re right, the through line of every thing that we do is hopeful and about connection. That was really lovely.
I: Thanks.
TFSR: So for my last question: Organizing, creating things, going to work, all of that takes a physical and emotional toll on us. Can you make the case for people playing more? When it comes to playing, make the case maybe for open endedness? If you feel that there’s a case to be made. How important are goals in relationship to what you envision with this game? Does that make sense?
MK: Can you explain what you mean by goals?
TFSR: I guess the goals within the gaming, the goals of the the scenarios?
MK: I see. Yeah. When you play a tabletop role playing game, you have a goal. You have the, “we want to steal the dragon egg.” (I don’t know why everything’s not dragons. There’s no dragons in our game.) There’s that goal. There’s the cliche, “The real treasure was a friends you made along the way,” that’s what tabletop role playing game is. The point of playing a tabletop role playing game is the fun that you have with your friends and the connection you have with your friends. It’s not always just fun, but there’s also a lot of processing. The classic thing is you realize you play a long enough game with people like if you play a long campaign and you’re like, “Oh, this is just your therapy.” You’re playing this character that interacts with the world like your mom does in order to get through some issues.
Collective imagination is something that our society strips away from us. We are usually passive consumers and I like turning off my brain and watching TV or whatever. I’m not trying to be like, “Oh, anyone who watches a movie is bad, right?” But there is something about generative fun, generative storytelling and things like that. I think it’s really invigorating. I think it brings people together. I think that that is a thing. Society worked really hard to tear us apart.
I don’t hate magic the gathering. I like Magic the Gathering just fine. I don’t really play it anymore. I played it when I was a kid. I was really proud of myself that I got to like write a cannon Magic the Gathering story. So I’m not trying to talk shit on it. But the reason that I like role playing instead, even though both have like elements that I like, fantasy and playing with people and stuff. I like not playing competitive games. And I love cooperative gaming. Tabletop role playing game has been built with cooperation in mind.
I’m not saying that competition is bad. I don’t like what it brings out in me. That’s why I don’t like it. I suddenly want to win. I become a jerk and I don’t want to be a jerk. I want to be the best version of myself. I can be the best version of myself when I’m sitting around and collectively trying to figure out how to problem solve with my friends about something that doesn’t really matter.
All the other stuff that we have to deal with in our day to day lives… “the Nazis are coming into town, they want to murder us all. What do we do, right?” That is a very high stakes kind of consensus decision making to make. But when you’re sitting around playing tabletop role playing game, you’re like, “Well, the worst case scenario is that my character dies and I make a new one.” That’s like, not nothing and you want to avoid it happening. But it’s just nice. I don’t know. I really like tabletop role playing games. It is my favorite style of fun. I don’t even like people. So that’s like saying a lot. Someone on the internet is gonna be like, “Margaret said that she’s a misanthrope and that everyone’s bad.” I know it. I know you’re gonna say it. Don’t say it.
Okay, someone else.
I: Gaming is really cool for all the reasons that Margaret said. In a cleaner way of what I said earlier, gaming with your friends is prefigurative work. It is coming up with, in a lot of different ways, how you interact with people, and how you organize with people, and how you envision worlds. That’s what I really love about gaming. Obviously, it’s really fun too. I get to run around with my magical wand or whatever and fight the nameless terror. That’s fun. It is also my favorite way to have fun.
But the thing that I really love about it is that you get to tell stories with people, and you get to figure out how to tell stories together and those stories can be simple stories. They can be how to get to the market, they can be how to help your friendly neighborhood pie shop, or they can be about confronting things within yourself, or within society, or it can be about envisioning new societies and new things, or it can be like zoning out and killing whatever the fantasy mook version in our game is. I think it’s like giant centipedes or the saints.
MK: The patchwork dolls or the cops.
I: Yeah, the cops. I think the grinding in our game is the cops.
R: I said don’t grind against cops. That’s gross. But the moment was gone. It just passed! Sorry.
For my part, at least on a personal level, I think that as a kid who grew up a bit weird and a bit lonely and with a really rich inner life inside my brain that I couldn’t really express to people or anything like that. Just finding people that are engaging in this kind of thing with me, made me feel very seen and very connected with people in a way that I couldn’t in a lot of other circumstances when I was younger. I think that’s really valuable and lovely.
TFSR: Is there anything that I didn’t ask that any of you would like to speak to before we wrap it up?
MK: Can I pitch the Kickstarter?
TFSR: Please do.
MK: We are currently Kickstarting this game in June 2023. If you’re listening to this after June 2023, you can still go find the game, possibly through the Kickstarter. If you Google Penumbra City, you’ll figure out how to buy this book. However, if you’re listening during the Kickstarter, there’s a lot of advantages to backing Kickstarter. The reason that pre-orders and Kickstarter type things are so important is that to a small press like ours, right, we are tiny press, it makes all the difference in the world to have a sense of how many copies we’re going to sell of something and to have the capital to put something out. We are making a foil embossed six by nine hardcover book. We want this book to be beautiful, we want this to be a thing that is worth having on your shelf and worth keeping around, something that will last. In order to do that, we need upfront capital.
We’ve already reached the upfront capital we need because of people who are excited about this game. However, there’s other advantages to backing the Kickstarter. In addition to being able to get the game at a discount. Also, because we’re making an expensive book, we’re making a very cheap digital version. The point is to have people to be able to play the game, not just make fancy objects, right? But fancy objects rule. So you can get the game at a discount. There’s also a ton of digital content, you will also get stickers that don’t exist anywhere else. There’s also a ton of digital content that you’ll get for free because we’ve unlocked a bunch of stretch goals. We might have unlocked our final stretch goal by the time you hear this.
So it’s possible that if you back this game, you will get three books, instead of one book. You’re already at least gonna get two books. You’re gonna get the physical book of Penumbra City, if you get that level. But you’re also going to get an entire campaign written by Inman. So a series of adventures that you can play together with your friends. Then the final stretch goal is going to be a novella by me written in this world. We’re just really excited about the amount of excitement that we’ve seen around this game. It feels like one of those ‘right place, right time’ moments. And we’ve been working on it for years and we’re just really excited to show it to people.
R: Yeah, you’re also gonna get my eternal love and gratitude specifically. Because I feel so happy to have put things that I’ve drawn out into the world for the first time in a really long time, and to have people like the way they look and be happy about them. Not that that matters in a Kickstarter reward kind of way. But you have my eternal love and gratitude.
I: Before I was able to play RPG games with my friends, the thing that drew them to me were the worlds. I would just read the lore and all that stuff, and the art. So, if you get this game, and even if you aren’t sure if you’re going to be able to play it, or if you’re new to gaming, it is a rich world that you can have a lot of fun exploring. The artwork in it is absolutely incredible, that Robin has created. So this is a book worth having even if you’re just going to read it to explore the world and even if you’re going to read it just to look at the amazing artwork. But you should find some friends and play it as well and then maybe kill a God King.
R: Don’t touch grass, play our game.
You put it that way and it connected something for me. I think we all haven’t really openly spoken to each other about this exact specific thing. But I have the same thing. Margaret was talking about how she had the magic cards and she was like, “Well, I don’t really want to play this because it’s competitive.” But I also, as a person who collected and played magic cards, was so much more into just reading them. There’s the little blurbs on them that are the little stories of these objects and these artifacts and these people, and I would wonder about them, and I would think about them. We’re all the types of people who were getting into the lore even when we didn’t have somebody to play the game with. With that in mind, I think we really have purposefully and accidentally tried to make a game book that would be just interesting to flip through and engage with on that level.
TFSR: Cool. Where can everybody find each of you online, should they desire?
I: You can find Penumbra City by googling Penumbra City, the Kickstarter will come out. You can also go to TangledWilderness.org to learn more about the publishing collective behind it, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can find me personally on Instagram @ShadowTailArtificery, and I also host one of the Strangers Podcasts: Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We talk about our monthly feature, and I do an interview with the author. You can also find me co hosting Live Like the World is Dying.
R: You can Find me on Instagram @MissRobinSavage and you can actually find Penumbra City on Instagram @PenumbraCity. You can also sometimes find me on a couple of strangers podcasts but not on a regular basis and not not anywhere except in the real world.
MK: You can’t find me in the real world. I’m hidden, usually on a mountaintop. You can find me on Twitter @MagpieKilljoy talking shit, claiming that I hate discourse while participating in discourse. You can find me on Instagram @MargaretKilljoy mostly posting pictures of my dog. You can hear me every Monday and Wednesday, host of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, a History podcast. Then every Friday, Live Like the World is Dying comes out. I’m one of the hosts of Live Like the World is Dying. You can also hear us right now on the Final Straw Radio. And if this is your first time listening to the Final Straw Radio, which is probably not, you now know that’s a cool show, and you should listen to it.
I: You can also hear us play the Penumbra City, if this has piqued your interest. There’s an actual play recording of us playing the game with Jamie Loftus. You can find that on YouTube by YouTube searching it or you can find it on any of our podcast channels, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness or Live Like the World is Dying.
R: And through the link on the Kickstarter, right?
I: Yeah, which is where you should go to find anything about the game because then you get to see the Kickstarter. So just find us on Kickstarter.
R: Consider submitting content to our collective, for zines and other publishing purposes. Tell us the things that you’re interested about. Find us at Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and engage with us. All right.
TFSR: Thank you all for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it. I apologize again for my not being able to get my camera to work.
MK: It’s okay, we know you secretly a wraith.
TFSR: Alright, take care, everybody. Thanks. Thank you so much.
This week, you’ll hear an interview with Matthew Scott, a journalist with ACPC in Atlanta to talk about recent developments with the struggle against Cop City, the building of a giant police training facility with a simulated cityscape for urban counter insurgency training for law enforcement from around the USA & around the world in a forest in Atlanta, Georgia. You can read Matthews work at ATLPressCollective.Com.
We review the development of the project and the organizing against it, touch on the current situation for the 41 people facing domestic terrorism charges from the state of Georgia, talk about the SWAT raid and financial crime charges against the Atlanta Solidarity bail fund, the vote by city council to move forward with tens of millions of dollars of funding despite 15 hours of public comment against and take a look at where the project is now that clearcutting has happened.
Matt Scott: My name is Matt Scott. I am a journalist with the Atlanta Community Press Collective. I’m based in Atlanta, GA. My preferred pronouns are either he or they, either one works interchangeably.
TFSR: And could you tell us a little bit about Atlanta Community Press Collective, ACPC, which I’m probably going to be using from now on? How did it start, how it works, and who works there?
MS: ACPC is definitely the easier way of referring to it. ACPC was founded in the fallout or the after period of the 2021 City Council vote to approve the Cop City lease. So it’s been around for about the same time as the Cop City Project, or the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center Project, as it is officially known. Cop City is its unofficial name. And I’m sure we’ll get into that a little later here. But it is an abolitionist, not-for-profit media platform built by community members. So I was not one of the founders. I’ve been a part of ACPC since late April, or early May of last year, officially. And over that time, ACPC first came on the scene with an exhaustive history of the area in which this project is supposed to be built. It was known as the old Atlanta prison farm. And then once I joined, I started to write articles about things that were happening as they were happening. And we transitioned into more of a journalism outlet and have begun bringing on more people. At this point, we are about seven individuals who are either volunteers, or there’s myself, a full-time staff member, and part-time staff members as well. We are looking to continue to expand.
TFSR: You mentioned that ACPC started up in conjunction with a part of the movement to Stop Cop City. Is ACPC a part of that movement? Is it alongside that movement? What’s its relationship with that?
MS: We are movement-aligned. We are not part of the movement. There’s definitely a separation, very intentionally. We are not the mouthpiece of the movement. We do take the work of journalism very seriously, and so we acknowledge that we have definitely a position, and we are coming at this from an abolitionist perspective where we don’t want to see Cop City built, but we operate outside of the movement to retain that independence and that separation where we are doing journalistic work without being compromised.
TFSR: Cool. For listeners who somehow haven’t heard or maybe heard the wrong thing, can you give a brief rundown of the struggle against Cop City? What Cop City is itself and the resistance that people have been putting up against its construction? I know there’s a lot of history right there.
MS: Yes. So Cop City is a $90-million public safety training center that is set to be built in an area of Atlanta called the South River Forest. This is the largest contiguous piece of forested land in Atlanta. It’s one of the largest internal city forested land pieces in the entire country. And it is known as one of the four lungs of Atlanta. Essentially, for the neighborhoods around the Cop City, it’s where flood protection takes place. Obviously, it has a cooling effect. And of course, it has a carbon capture effect. So this is a very important piece of forested land that is also attached to a river. It’s called the South River. And there’s a creek, Entrenchment Creek, that runs from this area of the forest into the South River, which is one of the endangered waterways. There are a lot of environmental concerns all around this project, in addition to the concerns about police militarization.
So, this is called Cop City because part of this facility will be essentially a police tactical training section that imitates real life. So, at this point, there’s scheduled to be built basically a city block with a gas station, a nightclub, apartments, and a house that police can use to simulate real-life events. They would argue that it’s to simulate active shooter events. More often than active shooter events, police are used to put down protest events and that is also where this would be practiced. So that is how the Cop City name came about. The project started all the way back in 2016 but fell off until 2021, when it was brought about again by the Atlanta Police Foundation, where they said that it will be built in this area of land. And they pitched it to the City Council and City Council approved, and there was a lot of public debate about the project, but a lot of the debate in front of the City Council was controlled. There were 17 hours of public comment. That was during the height of the COVID era, so City Council was meeting remotely. So 17 hours of virtual public comment, 70% of it was against passing this lease to build the facility. After the passage of the lease, people began to occupy the land. They became known as forest defenders.
Towards the end of 2021, about December of 2021, they set up a permanent encampment that was broken down by police about a month later. So from January 2022, all the way until January 2023, there was a permanent encampment. There were several sites throughout the forest where people were actively holding down the land, building tree-sits, to stop the facility from being constructed, to stop engineers from being able to come onto the site and lay down planning stakes, and things like that. So they very effectively did halt construction for a significant period of time. In December of 2022, police had a raid where they arrested six people and charged them with domestic terrorism charges. And then in January of 2023, there was another raid where they arrested seven people, and they killed a protester. And this is what is recognized, probably unfairly, as the first police killing of an environmental protester in the United States.
It’s the first one that’s recorded as such, but of course, police have likely killed protesters, maybe not as connected with a particular struggle before, without the recognition. So at this point now, the opposition to the project is a pretty vast coalition, from anarchists to environmentalists to regular old soccer moms, essentially. There are preschoolers. There’s an entire preschool where their curricula is dedicated to studying this forest. And the indigenous name, the Muskogee Creek, for it is the Weelaunee Forest, so we use that interchangeably. Their curricula is studying the Weelaunee Forest. And now with a referendum campaign that just launched, that coalition continues to grow. It’s expanded into more electorally-minded orgs. And throughout the last year, we’ve seen just this constant expansion in the umbrella that is the Stop Cop City movement.
TFSR: Cool. Thanks for that summary. The last time that the show featured an interview concerning the Atlanta Forest Defense, it was immediately after the murder of Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán by police. And you make a very good point that this is listed as the first killing by police of someone involved directly in an environmental movement in the US. And there are so many instances where, because of ecological defense work often being so distinguished geographically from cities or from a lot of witnesses, there is no way to prove to make that claim, right?
There’s tons of times when this could have happened without witnesses or without the amount of media attention that it’s gotten. A number of police claims from that time have been proven false by the independent autopsy and continuing media investigation and popular pressure. For instance, the officer who possibly shot himself, but the police were… I’m not sure if it was the Georgia State Bureau of Investigation or the Atlanta Police or the Troopers or who was making the claim that this cop was shot by Tortuguita and that this was an act of self-defense by the cop, but that’s just one of the things… The morning meditation position that it was found that Tortuguita was probably in when they were shot… I was wondering if you are aware of anything leading to charges against the Atlanta Police or any response from official institutions to this new evidence coming up or challenges to their claims.
MS: There is currently a lawsuit against the Atlanta Police Department for withholding information from the family of Manuel Paez Terán, or Tort as I will call them. That is a lawsuit just for the withholding of documents so that the family can learn what happened. There is a Georgia Bureau of Investigation investigation that happened around this. So Georgia State Patrol is the police unit that killed Tortuguita, and a Georgia State Patrolman was the officer who was allegedly shot by Tortuguita. So if there are any state charges, they would be levied against Georgia State Patrol, those Georgia State Patrol officers. That investigation from GBI was turned over to a district attorney in North GA, and there’s not been an update on the case since it was turned over. I believe it was sometime in late April, maybe early May, when the case was turned over. So we haven’t heard an update on that. As far as civil actions against the police, I would imagine that the investigation, the family’s investigation into the killing of Tortuguita, will probably lead at some point to some civil action against Georgia State Patrol. But as far as any other litigation against Atlanta police for the killing of Tortuguita, I don’t think that there would be any. And it is through body camera footage from the Atlanta Police Department, from one of their special teams. The team is called APEX. It’s similar to the SCORPION team that killed Tyre Nichols. Their body cam footage had one of their officers say, “You shot your own guy”, essentially, talking about the officer who was injured during that raid. That’s why this lawsuit against APD is happening because they apparently do have some information that they were withholding at the request of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
TFSR: Yeah, that’s wacky. So statewide repression against the movement to stop Cop City has continued to spread, which can be seen in the recent arrest in Atlanta City by, I think, Atlanta PD with the authority of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation of three activists doing bail support with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. And these folks were initially charged with money laundering and charity fraud. Can you talk a little bit about what you know about this SWAT-style raid and where the activists are now?
MS: To talk about this, we have to go to late February. In late February, there were conversations about the potential of RICO charges, Racketeering-Influenced Corrupt Organization charges against the Defend the Forest movement. And it was actually the Atlanta Solidarity Fund that opened up those conversations. They provided the evidence that these charges they believed were forthcoming. And then they had a presentation with the Civil Liberties Defense Center to explain what RICO charges were. And we’re gonna hold those RICO charges in our brains as we continue on here. But they expected RICO charges to drop before the Week of Action, and then they never did. ACPC actually released documents from the Atlanta Police Foundation where they were assuring their board and contractors that indictments would be coming against forest defenders to hopefully disrupt the movement. They were setting those out in early February. The charges never came, but through conversations or comments by prosecutors in the cases against the domestic terrorism defendants, they started to lay out this financial case and more and more indication that they were planning on doing some financial crimes charge. And a lot of these prosecutorial comments revolved around the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. At one point, a prosecutor said that the Atlanta Solidarity Fund is being investigated as at the center of this whole thing.
So the Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers were aware that this was likely to happen and had prepared some comment for it and had prepared another bail fund, this time the National Bail Network, to take over handling bail here in Atlanta in the case that these charges came down. So it was May 31st. Early in the morning, a police SWAT vehicle, an armored vehicle, and a SWAT team broke down the door of a house called the Tear Down. And this is a house in a gentrifying neighborhood that is an anti-gentrification house. They’ve lived there for I believe something like a decade at this point, maybe even a little bit longer. Out of this house, they ran Atlantis Food Not Bombs until COVID hit. They now run another nonprofit called Food For Life that provides thousands of pounds of free food each week. They also do a cop watch program. And of course the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, the bail fund program. So a lot of things are run out of his house. Atlanta Solidarity Fund predates the Cop City movement. It goes all the way back to 2016 where it was organized in response to anti-confederate and anti-fascist demonstrations.
They were arrested early that morning in their pajamas, taken to jail. We’re reading these warrants, and these warrants are alleging that they’re committing charity fraud through misuse of funds. And some of those misuse of funds that are cited as examples are reimbursements for gas, reimbursements for COVID tests, reimbursements for just supplies in general, purchasing a cell phone, as would be needed when you’re operating a bail fund. So the charity fraud aspects of it, and then they alleged that there was money laundering when the Atlanta Solidarity Fund sent I believe $20,000 to another bail network, and then that bail network sent that $20,000 back. In order to be money laundering, there had to be a crime that was covered up or a second crime in this transfer. Instead, it was just a straight transfer from one entity to another and back. And all of this is of course trackable on the Open Collective platform. So the charges were incredibly weak.
Nevertheless, prosecutors brought them forward. And when they were brought in front of a judge, even the judge was like “There’s not much meat on the bones here. You’re gonna have to do a lot better work if you want these charges to stick or to hold up in court.” So the judge granted these organizers a $15,000 bond, which may sound like a lot, but in Atlanta, we’re now dealing with anywhere from $300,000 to $600,000 bonds for a lot of our defendants arrested in relation to this movement. So it was pretty small in comparison. They are now out of jail. They are not allowed to post anything on social media, which is why you probably haven’t heard anything from them, as one of the stipulations of their bail conditions. They are allowed to talk to the press and talk to the media. So they have been doing that. So you might see them… one of them was on the Young Turks last week, and then they’ve been on national radio stations and national networks as well. But they are doing well. They knew this was coming. And of course, it’s a traumatic event, but they were prepared for it.
TFSR: In the context of what you say where there was clear communication going back to February where the Police Foundation and other authorities had said to investors and such that there were arrests that were being readied that we’re going to impact the ability of the movement to be able to respond to the Cop City project, it seems pretty clear that one could make the argument that there’s an attempt to impose a chilling effect on what could be deemed defensible First Amendment activities. I don’t know if that’s a thing that’s being pursued at this point or if people are still just rolling with the punches and trying to get the project stopped before thinking about bringing extra lawsuits against authorities.
MS: Yes. The chilling effect is definitely, from all appearances, the intent of this. It’s unclear if prosecutors really do think that the Solidarity Fund is some financial entity that is really underpinning the movement, or if they are going after the bail fund aspect of it, especially in light of… We’ve got an upcoming Week of Action at the end of this month, and they might have wanted to take it out in advance of that to discourage people from engaging in First Amendment activities, without knowing that there was going to be a bail fund to back them up. But there isn’t any legal action against that that I am aware of. There have been calls. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund published an open letter calling for a DOJ investigation into, in particular, these charges of money laundering and charity fraud as repressive tactics. So litigation might be forthcoming, or there might be some external investigation. A DOJ investigation was also called for by Senator Raphael Warnock. We’ll see how that plays out. But it definitely does strike as an attempt to chill engagement against this project.
TFSR: You mentioned domestic terrorism charges earlier against people that were engaging in… were just found in the forest but maybe some who might have been engaging in tree-sit activities. The state of Georgia continues to slap activists with these domestic terrorism charges, despite the fact that the protests people have attended don’t fall into any reasonable definition of terrorism. And as far as I’m aware, the Department of Homeland Security, the federal institution that would oversee charges of this sort, has recently reiterated that it doesn’t apply the term to any domestic formations or movements, that there’s no domestic terrorism charges or domestic terrorist groups that it recognizes. Are you aware of how many people are still inside, and how many are facing these kinds of charges? And for what activities?
MS: Yes, so there are 42 charges of domestic terrorism across 41 people. One person was charged twice, stemming from two separate events. Of those 41 people, there are two people that are still being held. The person who has two charges just had their bail revoked from their first charge, so they are now in DeKalb County Jail after violating their bail conditions. And then a second individual, Victor Puertas, was arrested on March 5 and charged with domestic terrorism and was released from DeKalb County Jail after 90 days. But then once he was released from DeKalb County Jail, he was picked up by ICE. He is a foreign national but a resident. He’s lived here for I believe something like a decade at this point. But he was taken by ICE and brought to Stewart County ICE detention facility. DeKalb County Jail, where he was held for those 90 days, is one of the worst jails in the state. And Stewart County Detention Center is also pretty atrocious and constantly under attack by civil rights watchdog groups for its conditions.
So he’s continuing to suffer pretty awful conditions for attending a music festival. Other than that, there’s another individual who is being held in a county north of Atlanta called Bartow County under charges of felony stalking and intimidation of a police officer for passing out flyers. And these flyes said “In your neighborhood, there’s a killer,” and named the Georgia State Police officers who killed Tortuguita. So they were passing those out in the neighborhood of this Georgia State Patrol Trooper, and the trooper called the local police and said that he wanted to press charges and that he felt threatened. So there were three individuals charged with that. One of them is still being held in jail for that. And the reason that they are still being held is that they took a reimbursement from an account that is linked to the Solidarity Fund under this umbrella network of nonprofits. Prosecutors used that reimbursement for camping equipment as a way to claim that this person was deeply involved with the Defend the Forest movement, and the judge did not grant them a bond condition.
TFSR: I understand that, because this is such a hot topic, and because there are a lot of right-wing trolls out there, I would imagine that a lot of people are wary of having their personal information put out on the internet, but are you aware of any places where people who do want support, who are still being held are facing charges, where one can find more information about them to try to help them out?
MS: Yes, every defendant individually is asked whether they would like their name put out there for things like support. So that is handled by the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. The Solidarity Fund is continuing to operate, and the Jail Support Network is continuing to operate. Their social media accounts would be the best place to find that. They have posted about Victor Puertas and what Victor is looking for in terms of support and how to send messages. Charlie is the defendant in Bartow County. I know that they are also looking for contact and messages. And I believe the defendant who’s in DeKalb County is also looking for that, but I am not sure, so I won’t say their name. But all that information would be on the Atlanta Solidarity Fund’s social networks, their Instagram account.
TFSR: That’s super helpful. Earlier this month, we saw at least 15 hours of public comment at the City Council by Atlanta residents, overwhelmingly speaking against funding Cop City, before the City Council decided to vote for double the initial funding for Cop City that was initially requested. As you quoted $90 million, of which $1.3 million will be paid every year towards it for the next 30 years, besides a lump sum. But some City Council members claimed that institutions like the Atlanta Police Department are a part of their constituency and one of the groups that they felt responsible for. So deciding to approve the funding and increased funding for this project was counterweighed by statements by institutions like the APD. Have you gotten a sense of response from the public to this vote?
MS: Yeah, so the city of Atlanta is going to pay $67 million total. We’re going to pay $30 million lump sum payment, and then it’s $1.2 million a year for 30 years for an extra $36 million out of the alleged $90 million total. And that’s important because the Atlanta Police Foundation said that they were going to pay $60 million of the $90 million, and that is flipped. So the 15 hours of public comment was pretty enlightening for a lot of people. And what we saw, even leading up to that… Three weeks prior, there was another public comment session that was shorter, just under seven and a half hours. And after that people started to come out to subcommittee meetings, and they were talking about how they were activated by watching all these people come out and give public comment and basically just be ignored. So we are continuing to see that effect. And that’s playing out now through the referendum effort where people are saying, “Okay, well, if City Council isn’t going to listen to the people, then we are going to take matters into our own hands and do this referendum.” A straight up or down vote on canceling the lease will potentially be on the November election ballot.
We’re seeing a lot of condemnation amongst the people. But the arguments that City Council has put forth, those who voted for the facility, I’m not really seeing anything other than a very small minority of people in favor of the facility accepting. People oppose the facility, and even people who are on the fence are still pretty shocked by the fact that you can have the largest in-person public comment session in at least modern history, if not all of Atlanta history, just be summarily ignored. And at this point, there’s something like… Between the call-in public comment and all the in-person public comment on this last go-around, we’re at something 48 hours of public comment. So essentially, two actual days of public comment, and a small minority of that was against. And I don’t think you see that really anywhere else. If this was anything else other than this police training center, I don’t think we would even be talking about going against that. But since we are talking about police, and we are talking about, in particular, the Atlanta Police Foundation, we are having a very different conversation where it seems like the public will is being ignored.
TFSR: So the remainder of that $90 million then would be coming, I guess, from the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is backed by independent investors, companies like Waffle House, Home Depot, Nationwide Insurance, stuff like that, is that right?
MS: Yeah, the last number I heard is that they were able to raise $33.4 million in actual donations from corporations and other philanthropic funds like the Robert Woodruff Foundation. And then they also have a $5 million new market tax credit that they’re getting. So they’re bringing in roughly $38 million. The price of this facility is going to be higher than $90 million by the time everything is said and done. But right now, they’ve brought that $38 million, and then they have a $20 million construction loan that is being paid off, from what we understand, through the $1.2 million yearly payments.
TFSR: At what point in the process is the actual construction of Cop City and destruction of the forest right there in the south commons?
MS: We are unfortunately in the second phase of construction. So clearcutting is over, and we are moving into mass grading. Clearcutting is of course environmentally devastating, but mass grading is changing the contours of land permanently. So we are having a large impact on the ecological structure of the South River Forest at this point. They are anticipating starting actual construction in late August. Whether they’re able to do so is going to depend on the referendum and potential injunctions or possible direct actions taken by actors down the line.
TFSR: Would injunctions be a separate process than the referendum? Or is that a part of the referendum, that once signatures have been collected, and it’s put to the City Council, I guess, to review that information, would that automatically force a stop in the construction? Or would they be able to just stall it out and continue the process of building Cop City?
MS: The organizers of the referendum are definitely going to seek injunctions. At this point, there was a prior court case on environmental grounds to overturn the land disturbance permit for Cop City. And when that was ongoing, that attorney also sought injunctive relief and was denied. So we can expect the Atlanta Police Foundation to fight any injunction. And for that environmental action injunction, the CEO Dave Wilkinson of the Atlanta Police Foundation said that he wanted construction to continue and that anyone could file for an injunction and it would essentially be insane to have to stop construction for any injunction filed against you or any action filed against you. So until a judge signs off on an injunction order, we could expect the Atlanta Police Foundation to continue construction. So with the referendum, there will likely be two injunctions. The first injunction they will seek when it looks like they will have enough signatures, so when they can reasonably argue in front of a judge that we are likely to succeed in our signature collection campaign. And that will hold construction until the end of the signature collecting window. If they can collect the number of signatures that they require, then they will seek another injunction to get injunctive relief all the way until the November 7 election.
TFSR: Okay, and I can see this being such a divisive topic that might have an impact on elected officials and how concerned they are about keeping their seats. You had mentioned that there’s an upcoming Week of Action around the forest defense. Are you aware of the details of it, of any of the public events or where more information can be found, what days it’s going to cross?
MS: The dates will be June 24th-July 1st. There is a kickoff event on June 24th at 1pm. I do not believe the venue has been publicly announced. And then there will be another music festival on July 1st at the end of the week of action, and the venue has not been announced either. A lot of this Week of Action seems to be a lot quieter than past Weeks of Action. And we expect to find information in terms of what is happening and where it’s happening closer to the event time. That information will be available on the various Defend the Forest social media accounts. There is a calendar on DefendTheAtlantaForest.org that I believe will be updated to include the events once they are made public.
TFSR: Considering the really heavy level of repression that people have been facing increasingly as the movement has gone on, is there much in the way of discussion from coordinators, organizers, or announcers of these events about ways that people can keep themselves safer while also attending and resisting?
MS: I am aware that there are internal conversations about keeping community members and keeping other activists and organizers safe throughout the process. I’m sure there will be education that goes on during the Week of Action. That is actually typically… Historically that has been done: how to keep yourself safe, what to do when a police officer approaches you. Those sorts of conversations are ones that were had by the Solidarity Fund organizers who are arrested, and I don’t know if they will be doing that this time around, but they do have other people volunteering in that cop watch organization who will do so. So the conversations are happening. I am sure that there will be some guidance given at the start of particular events about what they can expect. But of course, when you’re dealing with police, you never really know if they’re going to overreact or not. So there’s a level of risk involved in any of these events, even the ones that may seem relatively germane because of the unpredictability of police.
TFSR: Well, I know in the past, there have been coordinated info tours (I don’t know if that’s a thing you’ve heard anything about.) inn different places to hype up the week in advance, answer questions, and get people informed. Is that a thing that you’ve heard of? Or maybe people should just check out Scenes from the Atlanta Forest or other sites?
MS: Yeah, that information would be on various websites. I know that that’s something that’s happened in the past, and organizers in various cities will talk about the Week of Action before it happens. Ahead of the last Week of Action, there was the Week of Solidarity, where solidarity events took place in home cities, and these sorts of events happened. I am not aware of any of them coming up. I do believe that after this Week of Action, there will be some sort of actual info tour by organizers here going around speaking about Cop City in cities around at least the southeast, if not further afield. But I am not aware of anything happening leading up to the Week of Action in that regard.
TFSR: Just to tie this up and talk again about ACPC, I recall in past conversations that I’ve had about the movement to Stop Cop City that the coverage from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has been pretty terrible. I believe they have some connection to the Police Foundation, or am I wrong on that?
MS: So the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is owned by Cox Media Group, which is owned by Cox Enterprises. And the chairman of Cox Enterprises is Alex C. Taylor, who is a Cox family heir, but he served as the head of fundraising for the Cop City project. Cox has donated several million dollars to the Cop City project itself. So the coverage that has happened in our paper of record, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, hasn’t been good by and large. That has changed over the last couple of months. There’s a journalist named Riley Bunch who’s taken over, essentially, the Cop City beat. And she’s done more engagement and more critique and more challenge of the general narrative. So it is changing to some extent, the editorial board that runs the AJC is still producing pro-Cop City editorials at a rapid rate. It is definitely driven toward biased coverage of the Public Safety Training Center, or Cop City. But there are definitely journalists within the organization who are trying to do good work, are trying to actually engage in this project you would expect an outlet to do.
TFSR: It feels independent media projects often rise up because people aren’t seeing the conversations they want to see in the mainstream media or legacy media or whatever around them. I wonder, as a member of ACPC, what impact have you seen from any shifts in narrative? Do you think that the change in direction of the AJC towards covering Cop City has been impacted by the journalism that y’all have been doing? Are there other areas, other content or topics, that you all have covered that you’ve seen a shift in conversations about in regard to?
MS: I would certainly like to think that the coverage that we’ve done and the work that we’ve done has had an impact on the AJC’s editorial decisions. I have no evidence to that fact, but I would like to believe so. And to your point, ACPC definitely did come in the wake of a lack of journalistic engagement to this project. There was another publication here in Atlanta called The Great Speckled Bird that existed in the 60s and 70s that came in in very similar circumstances where, at that point they were the Journal and the Constitution, separate papers that were published in the morning and at night, but they didn’t engage in the Vietnam War in the way that left-leaning individuals thought they should. So they started their own publication. They started with the Great Speckled Bird, and it became this infamous and very important media institution in the city of Atlanta. They published exposés on the mayor. Their offices were firebombed. They had this very strong impact on the media landscape in Atlanta. I would like to think that we are following in the footsteps of The Great Speckled Bird in that regard.
TFSR: Awesome. Where can people find more work from ACPC?
MS: You can check out our website, atlpresscollective.com. We also spend a lot of time really thinking through a multimodal approach to delivering the news. So our Twitter feed @atlanta_press has a lot of information that maybe isn’t necessarily great for a full article, but it’s still important information to have. And then our Instagram account @atlpresscollective, we do deeper dives in terms of video stories.
TFSR: Cool. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to have this conversation and the work that y’all do. Thanks a lot.
MS: Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Transcription of A-Radio Berlin Segment
A-Radio Berlin: So we’re talking with a comrade from Ljubljana and so-called Slovenia, where the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair for its 20th anniversary will be returning to. The event will be happening from the 7th to the 9th of July. That is two weeks before the Saint-Imier gathering. Maybe before we start with the interview, could you present yourself shortly, your political background, and your involvement with the book fair?
Peter: Okay, thank you for having me. I’m Peter. I am involved with the anarchist movement in Ljubljana for many years now. I’m part of the local anarchist group that is part of the Anarchist Federation that is connecting the anarchist groups in Slovenia and parts of Croatia. I have been involved through this organization also with the Balkan Anarchist Network and with the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair as a specific project. I was actually also involved with the organization of the first book fair and the discussion that led to this project, to the initiative to create this event for the Balkan anarchist movement.
ARB: That’s amazing. We are happy to have you here. In its first public call for the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair, the organizational assembly wrote that since the other big international anarchists gathering in Saint-Imier was happening soon after you wanted to create an organic connection between the two gatherings. Could you elaborate a bit about this idea and also how it’s been translated into the practice of organizing the event?
Peter: Obviously, our movement and our local structures are involved with the internationalist anarchist movement. Our local organization has a few axes of international connection and organizing. Besides the Balkans is also a part of Europe. And because of that, we have on our radar for a long time already the big anniversary of the Anarchist International and the Saint-Imier meeting this summer. So when we started to organize the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair, we had this in mind. For us, it was important to somehow connect these two events, and also choose a date that would maybe facilitate participation of people in both events. But we also wanted to allow people who are coming to the Saint-Imier meeting from far away, from other continents, to use also this opportunity and come to Ljubljana for the book fair.
So, we decided to organize the book fair two weeks before the Saint-Imier meeting, and we tried to promote it together. One point for us, it also may be technical or geographical, but I think it’s interesting and important, Slovenia is located in specific geography. It’s the north border of the Balkans, but it also borders central and west Europe. So it is a space where people from different parts of Europe and the world can easily meet. So this was also one of the thoughts. Generally in a political sense, we think it is important to connect these two meetings also because we believe that parts of Europe are not so well introduced into the Balkan anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement. There are not a lot of strong connections with the Balkans, especially with the smaller movements in some of the countries of ex-Yugoslavia and some others also. So for us it’s also a big opportunity. Like the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair in Ljubljana this year, it’s an opportunity for people from different parts of Europe to meet, to be introduced to Balkan anarchism, to the history of Balkan anarchism, and to create connections for future cooperation, struggles, networking, and so on.
ARB: One of the hopes we have as an Anarchist Radio Berlin towards the Saint-Imier gathering is that it might be a place to have different parts of the anarchist movement, also not just Europe-centered, talk about how we can enact real change, how we can get away from just being a philosophy to being something practical. And in the open call of the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair, a similar wish is formulated. “We ask, are we doing enough and are we successful in building counterpower needed for real change?” And my question is how you’re trying to do this within the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair. Are there specific program parts or debates you’re looking for?
Peter: Yes, as you mentioned, we articulated very strongly in the first call for participation in the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair part of the political agenda of this meeting we are organizing in Ljubljana. In this call, we also say that for us, the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair was never only about books. It was mainly understood as a tool of the movement, the physical space where comrades from different countries can meet and have the opportunity to discuss important questions. Not only discuss important questions but also try to organize, to network, to create connections and future activities.
With all this in mind, this is the political agenda of the meeting. We went into the organization of the event itself. Firstly, we think that at the moment, there are many problems that not just our movement, but the whole society is facing, the Ukraine war being just the most extreme example of all of these problems that we as a society are facing at this time. And we think that the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair and also the Saint-Imier meeting will be important sites where these important questions can be discussed, and where different proposals can be articulated with the hope to find some common solutions to make more concrete steps in the future towards our political agenda.
So for us, one thing is clear. As anarchists in our local organization, we have a very strong principle, which we call anti-sectarianism. We think that it is very important generally, and we try to do this also in practice, to have some discussion and cooperation with all parts of the different anarchist tendencies or movements and even beyond the anarchist movement, because the questions are too big for small philosophical groupings or reading circles or whatever to address them in a serious way. This is our principle. To do this, we have to invite all parts of the anarchist movement to the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair. And we tried to do this, and we sent hundreds of personal concrete emails to different groups, organizations, collectives, people from all parts of the world actually and from different kinds of anarchist tendencies. So we understand this space.
The Balkan Anarchist Bookfair is an open space for the whole anarchist movement and a space where we can discuss important questions together. In a sense of how we will try to do this in practice with the program of the book fair, one of the ideas is to have not so much smaller presentations that are organized by specific groups on specific topics but to have more broad topics that are organized in a cluster format, which would mean that people from different perspectives, from different groups, organizations, and geographies can speak together on one topic. So cluster discussions will be one of the formats with which we try to address this agenda. And the other one will be organizational meetings. We hope that for a lot of content of the book fair, there will follow also some of the organizational efforts, in a sense of networking, in a sense of writing statements, publishing proposals after the book fair, and hopefully also already preparing some of the activities for the future.
ARB: Yes, that sounds good. The next question is about the anarchist movement in the Balkans. Is there such a thing? And if there is, what do you think, based on their history, based on their own experiences with practice and theory, they can bring? What are the strong points and the important topics that they can bring to Saint-Imier later on?
Peter: I definitely think that there is such a thing as anarchist movement in the Balkans, and the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair is just one of the expressions of this movement and also one of the tools connecting this movement. Obviously, the movement is developed in different regions on different levels. But there is a strong wish to create a common network. And we also understand the book fair as a way to do this. For instance, in the past, we put a lot of effort into supporting the small movements in countries like Kosovo, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and with the organization of the book fair, they somehow become more involved with the network.
The other thing is also some of the countries like Turkey, for instance, with which we don’t have a lot of connections, although there is a strong movement present. And we try to also connect the movement to our network. This year, we also put a lot of effort into bringing people that are usually not participating in the book fairs people, like from Istanbul will be coming from three different groups. There will be people from Kosovo, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, so we were successful in this way. And we hope that it will be the next step to creating these contacts and networks for the future.
Regarding content the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair can bring to the international anarchist movement or specifically to the Saint-Imier anarchist gathering, I think there are some specifics. The Balkans, especially with the experience of former socialist Yugoslavia, with the wars of the ‘90s, and with a totally different history of Turkey, for instance, in the south-east of the Balkans, I think there are some differences and some good contents that the movement from the Balkans can bring to the movement of the other parts of Europe. Two of these contents are the consistent anti-nationalism that the movement is developing throughout the years, which was always a very important point also at the political level of the Balkan Anarchist Network and Balkan Anarchist Bookfair as an event.
Obviously, this is because of the horrible, horrific experience of the Yugoslav Wars in the ‘90s, where we saw how nationalism was used by the political and economic elites to divide people and create gains for themselves. Another thing is connected with this topic and which is also very much discussed in the Balkan Anarchists Network, and part of the content of all of the book fairs is an anti-militarist perspective.
It is also connected with the experience of the Yugoslav Wars in the ‘90s on one level, and also on another level, for instance, the experience of the Greek state, of the movement there with the connection with NATO and American armies. So anti-militarist perspective is a very strong perspective, and I think that was articulated or discussed or practiced in a little bit different way. For instance, when talking about the war in Ukraine, Balkan Anarchist Bookfair was articulating the question about it already in 2014 at the Balkan Anarchist Bookfar that was held in Mostar. Mostar is a Bosnian city that was totally divided by two nationalities and destroyed by the war, and we thought it was a very good symbolic point to express explicit consistent anti-nationalist and anti-militarist perspectives at this book fair. So I hope the people from the West or from the East will listen to the articulations about war nationalism from the Balkan anarchists because we have some important points to share.
ARB: Okay, as a last question, could you tell us where people can find more information about the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair online and how they can reach you if they have questions or proposals? And secondly, could you very shortly tell us about the logistics that people need to know if they are coming to Ljubljana: accommodation, food, or whatever?
Peter: You can find all the information about the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair 2023 in Ljubljana at our website bab2023.espivblogs.net or bab2023.autonomia.org. There you will find all the information you need. We are updating the site regularly. So I think everything you need to know is there, all the information, also the contact that you can use for announcing your participation or sharing your proposals or questions. The email is bab2023@riseup.net. You can get some of the information also at the info events we are doing as part of the promotion of the event in different parts of Europe. Info events are also listed on the website. And this is more or less all you need to know.
Regarding the logistics, as we are expecting a lot of people, a lot of comrades coming to the book fair, many hundreds maybe even, this will be a big logistical challenge for the organizational team, especially in the sense to arrange free accommodation for everybody that is coming or for everybody that would need to have a free accommodation in Ljubljana. But we are optimistic. We are putting a lot of effort also in this way, and we think that it will be possible to host all the people in our communal spaces, in social centers, in squats, in other communal spaces, but also a lot in flats and houses of our comrades and supporters. Generally, we are asking people who can afford to try to arrange the accommodation by themselves, but this is just for those who can do this. Otherwise, contact us through email and we will find a solution. All other things at the book fair will be organized following the anarchist principles of anti-authoritarian self-organization. So there will be a lot of space where comrades come to the book fair and can actively get involved with all the help that will be needed from technical infrastructure, food, and other tasks. And of course, also in a sense of content, of organization of the event itself, its discussions, its activities, organizational meetings, and beyond that. So just a big invitation to everybody. We think it will be a big, strong, important gathering. We hope to get positive results afterward that can be used for our future struggles.
Here’s our interview with Shannon Clay, co-author of We Go Where They Go: The Story of Anti-Racist Action. For this episode, Shannon and I walk through the book, covering some of the history of the network, how it evolved, challenges it faced, and invitations to discuss current day anti-fascist and anti-racist organizing on Turtle Island.
This audio was released earlier to Patreon supporters of $3 or more a month. It’s one of the thank you gifts, alongside tshirts, zines, stickers and updates on the project. If you’d like to support our ongoing transcriptions help to make these conversations more accessible to a wider audience, give yourself that warm and fuzzy feeling by visiting tfsr.wtf/support for a link to ways to support our project with your pocket book.
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Featured Track:
Rude Boys Gone To Jail by Desmond Baker from Rude Boy Gone To Jail / Don’t Fool Me
Shannon Clay: I am Shannon Clay, he/him. I am one of four co-authors of the book We Go Where They Go: The Story of Anti-Racist Action, which is recently published by PM Press. My other three co-authors, Michael Staudenmaier, Kristin Schwartz, and Lady were all members of ARA back in the day, various chapters. I’m actually the only one of us who was not, ARA was a bit before my time basically.
TFSR: Thanks for taking the time to have this chat. I really appreciate it.
SC: Thanks so much for having me.
TFSR: A pleasure. So a few weeks ago from when we were recording this, at least, I had spoken with two of the people that had worked on the podcast version of It Did Happen Here, also published by PM Press and also a collaboration with Working-Class History, focusing on some of the struggles around the far right and the creation of Anti-Racist Action out of the skinhead scene and punk scene in Portland, Oregon in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. So this feels like a really poignant companion to that. Since that was pretty particular to the Portland area and it did give some of the Baldies’ background because of Mic’s connection to that, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind giving listeners a brief rundown of Anti-Racist Action, what it was, how long it lasted as a network iteration that’s covered in the book, Points of Unity and some of the basics.
SC: Anti-Racist Action was a militant, direct action-oriented, anti-racist, and anti-fascist youth movement, predominantly in the US and Canada, most active from its beginning in 1986 until our book ends coverage around 2003. We can later talk about that. By that time, ARA is becoming much smaller and also evolving much more into a newer style of anti-fascism. ARA would continue from 2003 until 2013 when it was reconstituted as the Torch Network. ARA rose out of skinhead and punk scenes to very concretely kick white supremacist, racist nazi boneheads out of the scenes and protect themselves, and arose out of that to become a really significant anti-racist and anti-fascist movement. Predominantly youth involvement, as I said, but ended up being hundreds of chapters, probably thousands of activists are really quite a big deal that maintains those roots to youth culture into punk rock and stuff, but also did manage to grow beyond them in interesting ways, and became – how I describe it to the much shorter version I give to people who maybe don’t have as much context is I just say – proto-Antifa. ARA very much laid the groundwork for what we now call Antifa, anti-fascist organizing in the US and Canada.
And I could maybe mention that as far as the connection to It Did Happen Here, great podcast. Great. I don’t have the book yet. But when I do, it’s gonna be a great book. As you said, they cover Portland. So we actually quoted from them pretty significantly for an early chapter of our book on those early years of ARA, and we complement each other nicely. It Did Happen Here is a deep dive into one city. ARA is one player among many. We are a nice inverse of that, of Oliver area’s history in many different cities across many different places.
TFSR: Cool. So as chapters coalesced and formed into these various networks, whether it’d be Syndicate to ARA Net, and I guess, to just Anti-Racist Action as an umbrella, there were shared Points of Unity among the groups. Because there were plenty of people that were in it that a lot of people can have anti-racist perspectives and be against the organizing of the Klan, or at that time, White Power movements, especially in the subcultures. It should be a pretty basic stance to be anti-racist. But that some shared values were expressed in the formulation of ARA as this network. I would love it if you could talk a little bit about what some of those Points of Unity were.
SC: Thank you so much for reminding them and not skipping over them. Is it cool if I actually just read them? They’re pretty short, I think. Cool.
ARAs Points of Unity, are the basic building blocks of agreement that if you’re in ARA, this is what we all agree and share. Whereas some groups have them, Points of Unity can be a pretty abstract or long document. ARAs were really punchy and to the point.
So “number 1, where we got the title from, “We go where they go. Whenever the fascists are organizing, we’re active in public, we’re there. We don’t believe in ignoring them or staying away from them. Never let the nazis have the streets.”
Number 2: We don’t rely on the cops or the courts to do our work for us. This doesn’t mean we never go to court but we must rely on ourselves to protect ourselves and stop the fascists.
Number 3: Non-sectarian defense of other anti-fascists. In ARA, we have a lot of different groups and individuals. We don’t agree about everything and we have a right to differ openly. But in this movement, an attack on one is an attack on us all. We stand behind each other.
Number 4: We support abortion rights and reproductive freedom. ARA intends to do the hard work necessary to build a broad, strong movement against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, discrimination against the disabled, the oldest, the youngest, and the most oppressed people. We want a classless, free society. We intend to win!”
Thanks again for asking. Because one, they are a really good, condensed way to understand fundamentally what ARA stood for, and two – they are punchy, “we go where they go, we intend to win”. Good work on those Points of Unity. So a really important aspect of the history for sure.
TFSR: Absolutely. It’s interesting when people start to coordinate over wide distances, or among larger groups of people setting out clear, basic things. It covers enough operational standards that people can agree to like, “Okay, we’ll go do a thing together, we may not agree on every single thing. But these few points are super succinct.” What I want to say also is that because we try not to be a US-centric show, I liked the fact that the book had a whole section, specifically on some of the chapters north of the border into so-called Canada. Some of the wins that were there were just fantastic.
But also I wonder if you wouldn’t mind talking about how the discussion of access to reproductive autonomy and abortion became a part of the Points of Unity because that was not an initial part of it. I’m jumping this question on you.
SC: Great question. Can I take this opportunity to go back and I can lay some groundwork and then masterfully weave it back more directly into your question? As we saw in the Points of Unity, reproductive freedom was a pretty explicit focus for a lot of ARA despite its name, Anti-Racist Action, and it was best known for anti-fascist politics. I think it’s really cool that it then brought in this reproductive freedom aspect.
To talk a bit about how we got there, I would just go back to get a little more detail about how it started. It started with skinhead and punk scenes of kids having fun, having their music scene, and having their physical spaces. And racists, far-right people pretty explicitly targeting especially skinhead culture for recruitment into racism, which a lot of people hear skinhead and immediately think of racism or nazis. But in fact, to this day within skinhead culture that’s not at all given. Skinhead culture was started as an explicitly multiracial culture of the working class, Black kids and white kids in the UK, coming together over music and just partying. That’s what skinhead was. It was tied to punk and it was a music scene. And you had nazis coming in. ARA was started by anti-racist skinheads specifically kicking racist skinheads out of the scene. A lot of the time, they were their own crews. They had the names: the Baldies, SHARPs (skinheads against racial prejudice), et cetera. ARA was a name to maybe bring in non-skinheads.
ARA always had those roots on the street level, I would say, including the use of physical confrontation. You can’t understand the roots of the ARA without understanding that sometimes it was just beating the shit out of some nazis who are coming to your show. Those are the roots. That’s where it comes from. And that continues because that’s its roots that really inform ARA throughout its history.
Then as it evolves, in the ‘90s, for example, you have ARA having a similar confrontational attitude against the Klan and a really big part of how ARA grows. There are Klans, especially in the Midwest, traveling all over having a rally a week. As opposed to pretty explicitly some cultural stuff, it is a bit more public-facing and Klans who are trying to get their message out to the public, they’re speaking at a courthouse and getting their message of something-something-white-supremacy. And then ARA is there and maybe it’s not a turf war in the same way it was for the skinheads, but still oftentimes confrontational. Things could get thrown for example, or even if it is just really shouting things down. ARA was a street-level, direct-action-oriented organization where the way that they tried to affect change was by being there, by doing it directly.
Throughout its history, there were ARA members who were doing pro-choice work, too. That’s really cool. But then, again, as I said masterfully, weaving it back to your original question of how it became a network-line thing, we start that story in 1996. So a good 10 years after the initial formation of ARA, two years after the ARA Network coalesced, it wasn’t just disparate chapters calling themselves by the same name and maybe they knew each other. There was this organizational structure and a network that had yearly conferences and stuff, that network was started in 1994. In 1996 is when ARA in Minneapolis is looking around their city, and by this time they had pretty meaningfully beaten the nazis and an organized racist presence out of their city. And nazis were not really able to walk the streets, or be at punctures and stuff the way that they had been 10 years ago. So they were looking around and they were thinking “Well, but what is affecting us on a day-to-day level?” They saw a very real presence of far-right, Christian-right, anti-abortion people. We have a quote in the book somewhere from an ARA in Minneapolis organizer named Katrina, something like “they fit the definition of fascism to us,” they’re seeing these far-right anti-choice people.
That inspired the ARA in Minneapolis to start doing some more pro-choice work in their own city. A really big reason why it was able to work was that it had tactical similarities to that street presence, direct action, and confrontational stuff that ARA had roots in. That’s not the only aspect of reproductive justice, but the aspect of reproductive justice that ARA was often doing was the street-level of things like clinic defenses. So that’s where you have an abortion clinic and you might have anti-abortion protesters who were as close as they’re legally allowed to be, but they’re shouting down, just trying to make it as intimidating and unwelcoming as possible to people coming in to get health care, maybe physically blocking people from getting into the clinic, maybe throwing shit, maybe attacking people. The anti-abortion movement still is and especially at this time was strong, and crazy. So you needed a presence of that physical street level of pro-choice people ensuring physical access to these clinics. That was a big part of what ARA chapters then got up to.
I mentioned Minneapolis, but as I said, for a long time, many different chapters have this orientation of getting on this street-level organization, physically defending clinics, and physically ensuring open access to clinics, escorting people into their appointments in order to support abortion rights. Because they saw around their towns that a lot of the people pushing anti-abortion politics… Their politics had a lot in common with fascism, a lot of pretty direct, just personnel ties of like “Hey, I’ve seen that person around before. They also do this white supremacist organizing, who knew?” So, a pretty natural outgrowth of ARA’s early anti-fascist and anti-racist organizing because of that technical element that it was something that they were capable of, that it was on the street level, then leads to Minneapolis taking it on and then even promoting it to the network as “Hey, guys, this is something that we should care about.”
At the national level, not a ton of decisions were made. The main thing about the network was this conference that happened every year, where there were workshops and an opportunity for people to get together and network. Basically, what the network looked like was the most you could do at the national level pretty much was the Points of Unity. So, Minneapolis then came and said that “we should explicitly build being pro-choice into our Points of Unity, which they weren’t up to that point, and make it explicit that if you want to be a part of this anti-racist movement, you need to be pro-choice. Wewant to understand the connections between white supremacy and anti-choice politics.” So they promoted a resolution to incorporate that into the Points of Unity, first in 1997, and it didn’t pass, but then it did pass in 1998. Having really led and facilitated that conversation within the network brought a lot of people around to it. The network successfully adopted that resolution for pro-choice politics.
TFSR: The chronological development in the book is super helpful for me. I was a teenager/child when a lot of this stuff was happening. From other readings, the chronology of the book really helps me to fill out the story of the development of anti-racist organizing in so-called North America or Turtle Island, which is gushing.
SC: Thank you.
Can I riff off that a bit? Because you didn’t just say the chronology of ARA, you said the chronology of anti-racist organizing and I think that’s true. Before this book, so little has been publicly available knowledge about ARA. As I said, ARA was before my time, so I came to the book as I heard about ARA and I was like “That sounds really cool. Weird that I’ve never heard anything about this and can’t find anything out about it.” So that was what started the whole process that eventually led to the book. But anyway, the point is that there was so little available about it. But ARA, it’s really worth stressing, was a pretty big deal. As someone who loves very obscure histories, ARA was not all that obscure, it was all over the so-called US and Canada. It was in many cities, as I said, with hundreds of chapters, and thousands of activists. And we are talking about the book, especially for white counter-cultural youth – not to underplay the influence and the participation that people of color have in the organization – but especially for a certain demographic of youth who wanted to get involved in progressive politics, ARA was THE game in town for anti-racist organizing in many significant ways. So I guess that’s a lot of words just to say that ARA was a big deal.
TFSR: Pointing out that, as you say, it is a point in this history of the development of anti-racist organizing in its various forms… There’s also a reference to the fact that, as you said, the Torch Network was somewhat of a rebirth of parts of the network in 2013. Then also on one of the sections that do talk about non-Midwestern development of chapters, Michael Novick is interviewed who is the main person behind Turning the Tide newspaper that’s been running for a couple of decades, plus the LA ARA chapter, which was also called PART. Also, Michael had been a part of a pre-existing formation that James Tracy co-authored a book about in 2020.
SC: With Hillary Moore.
TFSR: Yeah, exactly. Called No Fascist USA!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements, I’ve definitely heard right-wing conspiracy people drawing these lines and saying, “That was a product of SDS and Weather Underground, and before that, it was the Rosenbergs, and then it was Stalin!” But it is cool that there is some continuity there. There’s a multi-generationality of these forms and a legacy that gets transmitted through, and it evolves according to the people that are there and to the needs of the moment, too.
SC: There’s a lot of good stuff there and I’ll try to be quick… I laughed, but the only thing that made me laugh at that right-wing conspiracy thing was the mention of the Rosenbergs that came out of left field. Legitimately, JBAK did grow out of or it was four members of SDS and definitely, some of them were former members of the Weather Underground.
TFSR: Or Prairie Fire, at least, right?
SC: Yeah, Prairie Fire became Weather Underground. So, definitely a continuity there. Then it’s a bit more of a gap between JBAK, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, and ARA, but there were still connections there. Novick is one very important embodiment of that. Also, Cincinnati and Chicago are two very early and important ARA – I was gonna say chapters, they were early enough, they probably wouldn’t even use the word chapter. They were skinhead crews who were calling themselves Anti-Racist Action… Cincinnati and Chicago were two examples where they knew JBAK people, and then as you said, Michael Novick. So, that is a really cool example where ARA. That’s important. But absolutely, ARA did have the exception that proved the rule, were cool, important people like Michael Novick, important to the history of ARA, people who had been around for a while, and who did bring in that continuity and that memory. And Michael Novick especially.
You mentioned Turning the Tide, it is the journal that he’s been publishing for almost four decades now of really good, tight, anti-imperialist anti-colonial analysis. That’s something that he really brought to ARA, ARA didn’t necessarily have otherwise because a lot of ARA members – and this is cool – were not full-time Marxists or whatever. A lot of them were random kids from their local punk scene who wanted to get involved in something. And then you had that generational continuity of people who had been around for longer, taking that next level of analysis in history. That did have those ties for sure.
TFSR: Please fill in the details because there’s so much in this book. This is approached in the book and discussed as both positives and negatives, but a lot of white suburban kids coming in, wanting to do good, but also bringing their perspectives and their experiences in towards anti-racist organizing, and within the framework of the subculture. You mentioned in the book that at one of the conferences Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, who’s a Black Anarchist, gave a critique of the heart of membership diversity within the network, as well as addressing systematic oppressions besides just the visible boneheads in the streets. Which is a good topic to bring up. I think that that coalesced, at least in the way that the book was written, it corresponded to chapters taking that critique, whether it be from Mr. Ervin or other sources to heart, and expanding out into other forms of anti-racist organizing, recognizing things like the racist police as being an institution of racism that needs to be challenged, or working around prisoner solidarity stuff. We’ve already mentioned the stance into action around reproductive rights, but also queer defense and working in solidarity with independent folks or groups like Act Up.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that discussion about who are the participants and who shapes the direction of ARA. How do people try to address that?
SC: I am happy to add detail. At the same time, even the way you put the question, you did manage to capture a lot of good stuff. I don’t know if I would call them all necessarily “suburban”. But I know what you mean.
ARA always had these roots in punk and hardcore. That was a really big part of where its membership came from, where it recruited from, where it got a lot of material support from and so even if it wasn’t full-time ARA members, they were doing fundraisers and stuff. That’s how they get a lot of support. So, those cultural ties were always very real. If people are familiar with the punk scene, then they can use this metaphor. If you’re not, that’s okay, you can leave it and I believe this will still make sense. But I see the punkness and the whiteness in ARA as parallels. The parallel is that people sometimes talk about punk and ARA as a mostly “white” thing. You have to balance what numerically, at least in the so-called US and Canada, that is probably true. But you have to balance acknowledging the shortcomings of that, or just acknowledging what something is mostly white people, with not erasing the contributions of people of color. And so ARA as a decentralized network, many of its chapters were pretty multiracial. Those might often be, for example, in cities where the punk scene was also multiracial: Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, and some places in Southern California where the punk scene was very heavily Chicano and Asian. Those are places where you might get ARA chapters that were more multiracial, and then in other places, ARA might be more white.
In the case of the anti-Klan rallies, for example, a lot of times the Klan is coming to some random town in the middle of Indiana, and it is a pretty white area. Then you have kids who are in that town in Indiana, who want to stand up against it. So, that’s going to be a pretty white chapter, for example. ARA definitely would not have been what it was without the contributions of many important members of color, especially in the early skinhead years, starting of multiracial skinhead crews.
As far as how that impacts politics, ARA was definitely best known for anti-fascism. Its name was Anti-Racist Action. But it really started quite specifically as an anti-fascist thing, where they’re trying to push fascists out of their scene. Then you have someone like Kom’boa Ervin, who at the 1997 national conference gave a speech that criticized the ARA as too focused on…. I think I’ve heard it described as a “rival vanguard’s critique”, where you had ARA of a vanguard of the “good whites” who are anti-racist, fighting against this vanguard of the “bad whites”. They’re nazis and stuff. To a degree, that’s quite true of ARA – we want to be nuanced – but it’s true that, whether that’s how you want to describe it or not, ARA was best known for anti-fascism. The whiteness of anti-fascism, a lot of times you didn’t have a ton of people of color who wanted to go to Klan rallies to shout them down and oppose them. But still, we spoke to some people for the book, who talked about they did go to the anti-Klan rallies and they were the only person of color at the entire event. So, even though they’re on the anti-racist side and surrounded by anti-racists, still that might not be the most appealing activity.
There were a few different ways of thinking of the whiteness of ARA, where people were not only critical of it. So we have someone named Matt, who was a Cincinnati ARA member, who spoke about “every white kid in ARA is a white kid who’s not in the Klan.” So, they are very concretely competing for the same members who might otherwise be recruited into racism. Having lots of white people in your organization is a victory insofar as that’s lots of white people who are not racists. That’s mission accomplished. We quoted a Chicago area member named Tito who talks about fascism, and racism in white communities. He was saying that he thinks that that should be the responsibility of white people. The white people should be the ones going to these things and taking care of them.
So, ARA was quite white, a lot of the time, throughout its whole history never really came to a single decision about that. Because there is a tradition of leftist groups who are white anti-racist groups, that’s their point. This is where white people can come and contribute to anti-racism. We can relate to people of color groups in different ways, we can follow their leadership. Something like SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice), for example, is a pretty, at this point, big organization where the model is that “we are the white people who are here and able to support organizations led by people of color.” That’s what ARA was not, but then it wasn’t super clearly a really multiracial, anti-racist organization. So it had different approaches at different times, different people, different chapters, between “hell yeah, every white person [here] is a white person not in the Klan, that’s good” or “it’s white people’s responsibility,” or people like Ervin critiquing it like “if we want a sustained and most meaningful anti-racist organization, then we can only be concerned with the ‘vanguard of the fascists’, or the ‘vanguard of the racism’, we need to be worried about more day-to-day and institutional racism, like the police, racial capitalism, poverty – things that realistically do impact more people of color’s daily lives than probably a literal nazi walking down the street.” Different chapters tried to organize that style in different ways. We have a whole chapter about that.
You had multiracial chapters, like Detroit or Toronto. Maybe that was just based on where they were from, Toronto was based in a pretty multiracial city. 50% of the population of Toronto was not born in Canada. I didn’t know that, I learned that from my co-author, Chris. Even the punk scene in Toronto was quite multiracial. So they were based on that while still being quite directly anti-fascist. ARA Detroit, for example, managed to be definitely one of, if not the only, majority-POC ARA chapters, and they were organizing around economic demands. The city of Detroit was spending all this money on “urban development”, “urban renewal” and building a giant stadium. So, ARA demanded that a certain amount of these jobs should go to local Black youth. These should be good-paying jobs, and we should not have poverty wages in the city. They also had ties to aBblack high school. These were ways in which they did manage to bring in, through their organizing more specifically Black members. I hope that wasn’t too much. But it’s tough, because ARA was such a rich tapestry of many different chapters in cities and over time, that there’s no one single representative answer of the entire network. It was different cities doing things in different ways. That was the race aspect.
TFSR: That answer being longer is perfectly fine because I packed a bunch of presumptions into it that you were unpacking and being like “Well, that’s interesting you said suburban…”
Most of these chapters, as I noticed, are actually city chapters. So they’re an urban atmosphere.
SC: But I also do want to give credit to and I think it’s really cool that ARA was in – suburban has not occurred to me before – but in rural or small-town America a lot of the time with the anti-Klan organizing. The one that just always got dropped was Goshen, Indiana, a small town in Indiana, and a bunch of white kids living in the same trailer park. So it is really cool that ARA had this model that was relevant to people in that situation, and that you didn’t have to be in a city for ARA to work and abandon rural areas to the racists.
TFSR: Yeah, and having a central point of unity and the yearly gathering and the zines or bulletins to be able to communicate between chapters. It sems like a flexible model for people to focus on things that they felt they need to focus on where they were, and not just a cookie-cutter model across the continent.
SC: For sure.
TFSR: Some chapters focused on police brutality in the wake of a racist police murder, and racist media coverage in response to it. Finding the common threads with other extensions and expressions of white supremacy, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and learning how to fight it where you’re at, and also having a network of people that have your back, and is super inspirational. No wonder it lasted so long.
SC: Absolutely.
TFSR: Another question that I had is whether there is some talk in the book of outside organizations either interacting or sharing membership with ARA members or chapters or not. There’s a section where the ISO [International Socialist Organization] didn’t want to mess with or have anything to do with ARA, I guess because of the street-based politics of it. Whereas the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers League had members who were involved. That was a carryover from the skinhead era, right? When folks were splitting into- People who had shared space split into different sides of the more nationalist, skinheads against racism who were the Pro-Am / Pro-America and then the leftists either went down a Marxist or anarchist route. But there’s a mention of the Northeast Federation of Anarcho-Communists [NEFAC], or Love and Rage Anarchist Federation.
There’s a little bit of a sense in the book about how people interfaced in their chapters with these organizations. I wonder if there was much of a reference to a sense of entryism at any point where these organizations wanted to make ARA a thing that they did or had interaction with. There’s the Cincinnati killing, for instance, it was Cincinnati’s response to police violence leading to the October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation being formed. That model from the early ‘90s of responding to racist police murders or just police murders in general and centering the family members of the people that were killed by the police and changing the narratives and also organizing the community against racist policing, in a lot of places around the country that got taken over by Revolutionary Communist Party, the RCP, Bob Avakian cult took that over. There were some mentions in It Did Happen Here, where people had a criticism of leftist organizations coming in and either just using ARA chapters as their boot-squad, or trying to inject their party politics into ARA. Is that a thing that you were familiar with from these interviews or that seems to be an element?
SC: Absolutely. This is usually a bit simplistic obviously but we’re all comrades here, we’ll build a mental schema and divide the answer into the “good” – of when ARA was working with comrades in a good way in other groups – and “bad.”
So I’ll start with the bad stuff. Entryism didn’t end up being a huge problem because it was and ARA managed to solve it. We mentioned that ARA is an international network with some actual infrastructure between cities and not just informal ties. That international network started in 1994. At the very first meeting of that, ARA was actually just part of it. So that’s why initially, it actually called itself the Midwest Antifascist Network. But don’t let that confuse you. It was renamed to ARA Network a year later in 1995. But in 1994, at this first conference, there were other communists, and there was a real sense of concern from the ARA people that it really seemed there were people who were trying to make a national structure that could bring in people and they could bring in these lumpen ARA members. But then there would be this convoluted committee structure and a National Coordinating Committee that the communists who were proposing this structure would presumably be in charge of it, and then they could have this front group that they would be pulling the strings on. The ARA members thought that that’s what it seemed like this more centralized structure could lead to that some people at the 1994 conference were suggesting and they said, “We don’t like that.” That’s what led to the network having the very decentralized structure that it did end up having, specifically the very horizontal structure it had, where there was no Central Committee. I’m going to quote an ARA member named Jerry, “There was no central committee to stack with your people.” The way that the network was structured was on national decisions, any one chapter got two votes, regardless of chapter size. So, even if you had an RCP or an ISO or whatever with really strong control, and who just decided “Let’s join ARA, we’ll bring our 300-member organization that’s based in a couple of cities,” that wouldn’t really get them very far. Because they would have as many votes as everyone else. So they weren’t able to take over.
So that was an anarchist influence of some anarchist members of ARA, although also one of the organizations you mentioned was the Revolutionary Workers League, which had Trotskyist ARA members who grew out of the Cincinnati skinhead scene. They were not a huge group, but they were Trotskyists. But they were agreeing, they had been in ARA from the ground floor, had a better understanding of it, and being like “We’re a part of it really, and we aren’t an outside group.” They were saying, “Well, in our own chapter in Cincinnati, there’s us, we’re Trotskyists, but there are a bunch of anarchists.” By this point, there probably weren’t patriotic American skinheads who didn’t like nazis. But there might be centrist people. So they were like “Well, even in our own chapter, we have to have pretty broad Points of Unity that what we agree on is fighting nazis. Because if we agreed on the ideal formation of a Vanguard party to achieve socialism to build towards communism, then you would have all the anarchist members or the more liberal mainstream members being ’Well, that’s not our politics.’ So that’s just one chapter. So then using that out across the entire network, and obviously, we need this to be pretty horizontal and there’s room to disagree. That doesn’t break our organization or the work that we’re doing because what we agree on is anti-fascism.”
The successful relationships with other organizations were – once that structure was established / the groups who knew and understood that model and scope- As I said, there was this Revolutionary Workers League who was very authentically a part of ARA from the beginning. This is less than 10 people. But they’re not trying to take it over or whatever. The biggest outside organization would be the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, which had members in various cities. Love and Rage was initially an anarchist newspaper, and then they had a conference to bring together people from many different cities in order to build a structure to publish this anarchist newspaper Love and Rage and then that grew into Love & Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation as an organizing group. So they doing their own thing, but a lot of them were involved in ARA, or a lot of ARA people were involved in Love and Rage. I’ve heard at least one person described that as “entryist” in the sense that there’s this other political group who sees ARA and is like “Well, let’s get involved in that.” But the reason that I wouldn’t call it entryism, or certainly that I don’t think anyone viewed it as a particularly entryism, was that it understood that horizontality and there were no committees to stack with your people. So they are Love and Rage members, but they’re also members of ARA, and so they’re just trying to bring ARA in the direction that they want to see it go in, like any other member of ARA.
Then Love and Rage had an ARA working group of Love and Rage members who were in an ARA and they would talk together and think about what direction they wanted ARA to go in and advocate for that. But in an aboveboard way, and not weird entryism. I wish people could speak to the people who were there because most of the time, there have been funny stories of hapless college communists getting up to the microphone and they have their notebooks with a speech all written out about “ARA must build for the revolutionary working class and must come to the masses” and something. Then someone told me that at some point, someone giving a speech like that just went over their time. They kept going over their time until some big skinhead just physically picked them up and just waddled out of the conference room [carrying them]. So pretty funny images in my head of hapless but ill-intent college communists trying to take over ARA. The national structure was built in a way that wouldn’t allow that, influenced by an anarchist lens, or just by people who understood that in order for ARA to work, it had to be decentralized in order to bring people from many different backgrounds. After that, relationships with other organizations were more positive and equal, because ARA couldn’t really be taken over. So if a chapter wants to work with someone, they can.
TFSR: I really enjoyed this book. This is feedback that I gave to the It Did Happen Here folks, that there’s a narrative structure that comes up and guides the conversation. Then you see little bits of people’s personal narratives who were engaged in various chapters, talking about these things that affected them at the time, plus all the flyers. It’s a really entertaining read. There’s just so much in there. You built off of some of the stuff that was in the It Did Happen Here podcast. This is the similarity between the two, besides both working from some of the same interviews, also PM Press, Working-Class History. I’d love to hear about what this process for building the book looked like, and what your experience was of it.
SC: Absolutely. It Did Happen Here is a deep dive into one city, and our book is a coverage of ARA as a whole network across two decades and all this stuff. So we definitely complement each other. We quote some of the same interviews. But, dear listener, don’t be afraid, we’re not repeating each other. Get both books. They’re both a must-read, and you’ll be smarty pants.
As far as the book process, I hope people are interested in this. I talking about it. I had a good time. My three co-authors were in ARA, I was younger. I first got involved as a student at University, and I had to write a final paper for my history degree. I heard about ARA and was really shocked at the fact that so little information about it seemed to be available, even though it seemed to be a really big deal. So I was like “There’s got to be something here and we should probably write something about this and make the history more accessible.” So I reached out to the One People’s Project out of New Jersey which is quite a public-facing Antifa group and does great work. Lady worked with them, and one of our co-authors…
TFSR: Shout out to Daryle Lamont Jenkins!
SC: Shout out to Daryle Lamont Jenkins, who put us into contact with Mic Crewnshaw of It Did Happen Here and another member of the Baldies, specifically a black skinhead of the same generation as Mic, put me in touch with someone else. Of all these who put me in touch with 40 different ARA members. I interviewed many different ARA members in order to write my little college paper. Then other people talked about how there should be a more publicly available history of ARA, and so that ended up coalescing into the group of the four of us: me, Michael Staudenmaier, Kristin Schwartz, and Lady who wrote the book collectively.
I had a good time doing it. Well, writing a book is hard, but it started before the pandemic, then I was on pandemic unemployment and it seemed like a good time. That was a big part of my 2020 and the first half of 2021 pretty much writing this. It was a collective process. Super fun. I am super pumped to have gotten to know this earlier generation of radicals. I know it’s two-dimensional, but it can still be discouraging to feel like you can’t trust anyone over 30 or whatever. “Something something, racist Boomers… “ It feels like every person over 30 doesn’t get it. Obviously, that’s not true. Not mentioned it being ageist, but I didn’t and very few people do have those intergenerational connections. I didn’t know people who had been doing anti-racist militant work for 40 years, and this project allowed me to meet some of those people and learn so much from them. So I’m super grateful for it. Dear listener, maybe you can’t have quite the wonderful experience I did. But by reading you, too, can learn from all these wonderful people.
TFSR: Or if you’re in an area that wasn’t able to be a focus of the book just because of a) the scope of this project, but b) because there wasn’t as much intense infrastructure in the area that you’re at, but you have a history of ARA, maybe that’s you could contribute to a follow-up book?
SC: Yeah… Maybe? They can write the book, not me.
TFSR: I’d definitely like to talk about the legacy, chapter 10. I guess this is a shortened version of it. But in a prior chapter, there was discussion of some of the hard turning points that ARA experienced, three tragedies that are focused on in one chapter: the increasing surveillance from cops and big charges coming against anti-racist organizers who were active in Kalamazoo. Was that World Church of the Creator?
SC: That was I believe an anti-Klan rally. Those happened almost literally within the same week of each other: in Kalamazoo, Michigan, those arrests at an anti-Klan rally. But then, over in Las Vegas, there were two, probably the most visible, ARA members murdered by some of the nazis that they were organizing against. So, both of those events, also happening at almost exactly the same time in July of 1998, are self-evidently very big and traumatic deals and were real challenges for the network. It was Daniel Shersty and Lin ‘Spit’ Newborn. Also, it’s important to remember these histories that happened, worth calling out that Spit was Black and was one of the ARA’s Black members, I believe, a skinhead. ARA was not a uniformly white organization, but it’s also true that a Black member of ARA was in the minority. It’s just telling, obviously, and tragic that of all the ARA members to be murdered – that’s not to say that it would be okay if it was a white person who’s murdered – it’s telling that despite Black members of ARA being a relative minority, of the two people who were murdered, one of them was Black and that’s what nazis do.
TFSR: He was also an outspoken musician, who took the opportunity during performances to read poetry against nazis and also in his music. And if you look at the June 2016 events in Sacramento California, it was a very diverse crowd. A lot of the people that got stabbed by nazis were specifically people of color or people that one could read as being gender non-conforming. I don’t think that’s an accident for sure.
SC: Charles, who was in Detroit ARA, remembers “My friend who I lived with and hung out with and it was in Detroit ARA, he was white, and I was Black. We were two of the main organizers in Detroit. Then what happens, a Black guy and a white guy got killed in Las Vegas. I definitely had some feelings about that. It was quite a blow to me personally, as a Black organizer in Detroit ARA.” The murders of Dan and Spit reverberate for sure.
TFSR: Also the bringing of charges internally of gendered violence in the Columbus Ohio chapter, which held a lot of institutional responsibility but also power, I guess, in the network for having hosted a couple of the yearly gatherings, as well as the mailing list, maybe one of the big bulletins was based out of there.
SC: Yeah, the biggest one is called ARA News, because ARA as a network did not have a single national mouthpiece or whatever. The biggest one was ARA Columbus, or ARA News published by ARA Columbus helped by some funding of radical lawyers that they hadn’t been involved.
TFSR: As anyone who’s been in the community generally, but in an activist group, it’s devastating to learn that people who have a social clout in our scenes and who are involved in organizing also engage sometimes in bad behavior towards each other, because we live in a patriarchal society and it’s hard not to reproduce those patterns. I’m not meaning to blow it over and minimize the experience that people had there. It’s an ongoing issue, obviously, in all of society, as well as in the microcosms of community organizing.
Do you want to talk about the impact of those things? I was gonna lead into just the lessons chapter. Because, among other things, there are lessons to be taken from all those. I appreciate the fact that the book talks about it, it gives at least three examples of problems that occurred that maybe folks involved in ARA didn’t have all of the tools to be able to deal with at the time and that are ongoing challenge because of our society towards the continuation of and bettering of anti-fascist organizing and struggle. Again, the warts-and-all approach to history is good, is really important to not paint over that stuff. Because a lot of those issues, until we finally figure out patriarchy, those kinds of issues are going to be coming back over and over again. So, talking about people dealing with it in their various ways and not being silent about it is super important.
SC: I’m not going to play 4D Chess here and say, “Oh, those things were good, actually,” but you can’t tell the story of other things that ARA did that were positive without knowing those. So, for example, I was the one who had a pretty simple AB narrative of like “Oh, there were these allegations of sexual assault,” in a few chapters, but most prominently in Columbus, because of their out-sized roles, almost de facto national network. That’s bad, obviously. Then a bit after that, ARA got smaller. Therefore AB makes sense.
It was actually my co-authors, Kris and Lady, who both were a bit uncomfortable with that as a simplistic narrative. On their side, it’s absolutely true that actually, 1998 was not the biggest year for ARA, a year later was, and it was a pretty significant rise. It was from 1996 to 1999. It went from 30 chapters to almost 200. So 1999 was the peak and not 1998, it wasn’t a sudden drop. Lady who was in ARA Columbus, but after this conflict, didn’t feel it super impacted the organizing that she saw happen. Another Columbus ARA member mentioned that with Columbus having less of a role in the national organizing, they focused a bit more on their own city and grew a bit in that sense. Then also, Kris really felt that there was really important and dynamic organizing that was done in response to the gendered violence in ARA, and that basically, she didn’t want to paint this simplistic narrative of this bad thing happened and then ARA, especially the women in ARA were victims, and then it was bad. That there was a proactive response to it and they took it as an opportunity to confront and root out misogyny and patriarchy and gendered violence in their organizations. And that Toronto had some accountability processes with people in their own chapter. It was really hard, and they didn’t like it. They felt for too much time, it was a huge part of what they were doing – just dealing with their own shit. But then they came out on the other end stronger. So, not that these sexual assaults and gendered violence things happening was good, they obviously weren’t, but ARA can respond to it dynamically, and not be passive victims that have their own history. So that’s another reason that the warts-and-all approach is important.
TFSR: Thank you.
SC: Courtesy of my two co-authors, Lady and Kris.
TFSR: That’s awesome. Thank you for pointing that out. Would you mind going through some of the contents of the legacy and lessons chapter at the end? Because that in conjunction with all the awesome history that comes before it is a nice invitation for discussion among folks.
SC: Thank you. I do hope that people take it as an invitation to discussion, because it’s so easy, perhaps too easy, on the left to wag your finger, and say, “This is how we should be doing it.” So chapter 10, how we end the book is with the lessons that we as co-authors thought that we could take from the history of ARA, and we think that they’re important, and we do think that they’re good and important lessons, or else we wouldn’t have written them. But I do hope that it can be, as you said, an invitation for continued discussion with all of us having the shared objective of building and strengthening anti-fascism and anti-racism. And it’s not me, as someone who is frankly not been super involved in on-the-ground anti-fascism, telling people who are involved in that how they’re supposed to be doing things. Easy for me to say. So it is an invitation and it is a discussion, and I hope that anti-fascists can engage with it in a way other than just listen to what I think. That it can be a two-way conversation. But that’s how we close the book, with some lessons that we thought were really important. I can get into those, humbly, if I dare.
For me, the first one that always comes to mind, just because it’s very simple and concrete, is that ARA was a very public-facing group, compared to the default vision in people’s heads of Antifa in 2023. I was really shocked when I first started researching about ARA and it came up in the first conversation I had with Daryle Lamont Jenkins, where I was like “Wait, so it sounds like you’re describing the group that was above-ground.” That just blew my mind. Because I just took for granted that anti-fascism is: you mask up, you are in a group of maybe six people who have known each other for years. You have to be extremely important about what you say to whom, and ARA didn’t do that. So that’s a really important lesson, not that people shouldn’t do that, that people shouldn’t be very security conscious, but that very closed-off anonymous way of organizing is not the only way to organize, is not how you have to organize. There’s room for both. ARA did absolutely fucking throw down. Yet they were, in really important and inspiring ways, able to do that without being this small revolutionary cadre organization that people couldn’t get involved in. You can have an organization that has different levels of risk.
The vignette that we opened the book with involves a smaller but still 100+ group of people having a “baseball game”, where nazis were going to hand out tickets and tell a location for a white power music show, ARA was there with bats, and they were militant. But then after they had shut down the person handing out directions, they went to where they knew that the show was being held. There was a public protest of just families who lived in the neighborhood because they had gone door to door. You had just this mass participation. It didn’t have to be people who were all willing to go toe to toe against a nazi with a baseball bat. I think it was a working-class, diverse neighborhood of St. Paul saying, “Why are there nazis in our neighborhood?”
And that you can do anti-fascism in a way that you don’t have to necessarily compromise your politics or compromise some of the tactics that you’re open to. You can still do those things, but also be open to people and “everyday anti-fascism.” Anti-fascism doesn’t have to be a thing for leftist elites who have been in the movement for 10 years and know all the jargon and all the security culture and have their black-bloc outfit, ready to go stashed in their backpack at a moment’s notice or whatever.
But again, I really don’t want to wag my finger, there are very important reasons that people are concerned about their security and take the closed-off approach. Not at all saying that it’s wrong. But ARA really inspiringly says that it’s not the only way, that it is possible to have a more open approach.
TFSR: I didn’t take it personally as you wagging a finger. But there is a stereotype of anti-fascist organizing that it bears reminding people that it looks a lot of different ways and whether it’d be the Pop Mob model or public education more widely or going door to door to talk to people, I think is super important.
Or, a thing that we didn’t really talk about too much in the book, most of it’s been about showing up to respond to reactionaries, but research, documentation, and the distribution of that information about like “You’ve got a dangerous nazi that lives in your neighborhood. Did you know that? You might want to be careful or maybe you should shame them?” Not everyone’s gonna be a Tom Metzger, get a TV show, or be super public-facing about it, because thankfully, being a nazi or Klan member, or any of these variant anti-Semite jerks is generally not an acceptable thing in our society. It’s good to make it- It’s not just the good white Vanguard versus the bad white Vanguard fighting each other.
SC: So that’s a big one that comes to mind as far as lessons just because it’s so visible. Otherwise, we talked about the possibilities of ARA tying in with reproductive freedom. That did not detract from but very much strengthened ARA’s anti-fascist and anti-racist organizing, while also supporting reproductive freedom. So that’s awesome. Something that anti-fascist and anti-racist can still do.
I mentioned it, but we didn’t talk a ton about the concrete ways in which ARA was tied to youth culture. That’s really cool. It ties to the above-ground organizing as well, that it’s hard to have a fundraiser for your group if you’re hiding 100% of your identities, maybe. So it may be related, but ARA had a really strong base of support in youth culture and it’s also good not to just shut ourselves off in echo chambers of punk rock kids or whatever, but it is cool and positive for anti-racist politics to have that base of support. Also, that punk as a bastion of at least vaguely progressive politics didn’t come from anywhere and didn’t happen overnight, it had people like Anti-Racist Action, organizing for it, and making sure that that was the case when maybe it could have gone a different direction, maybe nazis could have taken over the punk scene. Now the whole generation of kids who came up in the punk scene and got pushed towards leftist politics could have instead been pushed towards nazism. We didn’t have that because ARA and other groups did that work. So, that’s really cool that ARA had a positive influence, it didn’t just take from youth culture and that was a place where they could go for recruits or money. It built youth culture. Some chapters literally ran venues and said, “Hey, this is a place we can get together. We can be safe. Racism isn’t cool here. Sexism isn’t cool here.” “Cool” is a good word to use there. They were making anti-racism cool.
In The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, published by INCITE, women of color against violence, there’s a chapter about the women’s lib movement consciousness-raising groups versus nonprofits that are giving support to survivors of abuse. Obviously, having institutions like that are important. It’s not criticizing the idea of having shelters for people who have been abused. But for a lot of leftists, or at least in my generation, we think of “awareness-raising” as something that’s so abstract and not cool. If all you’re doing is awareness raising, then “Oh, you’re not doing real work.” But consciousness-raising and the women’s lib movement fundamentally saying patriarchy is not fucking okay really matters. It doesn’t have to be concrete policy goals. It doesn’t have to be concretely shutting down this racist group. If you are going out and educating people and changing people’s minds on a mass-social-movement level, that does matter. ARA managed to do that in meaningful ways, with their connections to youth culture.
Interesting lessons, not clear answers, but lessons for sure, of ARA’s history. Was it a “white anti-racist group”? Was it a multiracial group? Would chapters work in solidarity with POC-lead organizing, would they be a part of POC-lead organizing? There are many different strategies. Those are perennial challenges really for leftism, and ARA offers many different examples of ways to approach that, and how you might connect anti-fascism to more day-to-day anti-racism.
I hope I am not just rattling them off because they’re big topics, but maybe if the listener wants to know, they just have to purchase We Go Where They Go from PM Press or a University of Regina Press or Working Class History. That’s the US, Canada, and Europe, respectively. If you’re just thinking like “Oh, Shannon, you’re so smart, I wish I could keep this going”, then you gotta buy the book.
TFSR: Or you come to their town and give a talk?
SC: Sure, deadass, ask me, shannonclay@protonmail.com, people can email me.
TFSR: I didn’t want to interrupt you. When you were talking about the importance of keeping engaged with youth culture, people were running venues also, people were in bands, and people were shifting this. We’ve seen there is a separate milieu of white-power punk bands out there that are run by white-power groups. Resistance Records stuff, it gets bigger in metal, there’s more space for the crossover because of the idea of extremism and all the layers of the culture of metal allow for just extremity that sometimes invites in nazi imagery, but doesn’t have to.
But it’s also worth noting the Warped Tour and the work that Mighty Mighty BossToneS as a band did to popularize and spread anti-racist activity in the punk and ska scene, digging back to the skinhead roots of the earlier groups that founded the network, I thought that was super inspiring. That coincided with that huge jump in membership over those three years.
SC: Absolutely. I don’t want to say generation because it cuts across age. But just in this cultural moment, A lot of us are wondering is ska cool again? Can I listen to third-wave ska? And this book establishes that the Mighty Mighty BossToneS were anti-racist actually. So you are allowed to listen to the Mighty Mighty BossToneS if you want to. Every time someone told me that the Mighty Mighty BossToneS were a big part of how ARA grew, I learned this five years ago now and I’m still laughing about it. Dear listener, the Mighty Mighty BossToneS, and ARA met at Lollapalooza. Boston’s had ARA on tour and ARA got the word out a lot through that. Hilarious.
TFSR: That’s great. Any group that has one position in the band’s job is literally just to skank onstage. Skanking is their instrument.
SC: Skanking while shouting against fascism!
TFSR: But also, one of the earlier big concerts that I went to was to see Rage Against The Machine on tour for Evil Empire. They had Zapatistas support org and the FZLN had a table at that venue. ARA, probably a chapter from LA, but maybe it was the Bay Area chapter, had a table at that venue. That was the first time I heard of the organization. Some bands got pressured to stop playing with nazis. Some bands engaged around pushing venues and pushing content and making space for awesome, collective organizing projects with good politics.
SC: Absolutely. Thanks to Tom Morello for giving us a nice review.
TFSR: That’s nice. That’s cool.
How do you feel, were there any burning things that we didn’t talk about that you wanted to address? I have kept you on for a very long time. I enjoyed the conversation and I enjoyed the book and I hope that people don’t steal it from Firestorm, please.
SC: Of course, people are gonna think I’m biased because I wrote the book. It’s a good book. I doubt that all right another book is good, that the history really speaks for itself. It’s an incredibly important and interesting and powerful history. Don’t take it from me is “the author,” I really feel like I stumbled into and I’m hugely privileged to have been a part of telling this history because the history itself is just so good and powerful. We did really try to let the people who were there speak through the book. Ignore the fact that I’m one of the authors. It’s a really good book and if you think you might want to buy it, buy it. You’ll be glad you did.
TFSR: Awesome. Thank you again for taking the time. Are there any social media that you’d like to point people to? You gave out your email already.
SC: I guess that’s maybe Boomer energy a bit but I don’t really do social media. So for real, if people want to talk, they can email me. Thank you again, so much for having me. I told you this before we recorded but not up till now, I am a big fan of the show, longtime first time, so very happy to be here. Thank you for having me. Super appreciate it. I had a lovely time.
This week we chatted with Jasmine, an anthropologist and activist involved in the migrant solidarity and freedom of movement cultural organization called Maldusa which is based in some of the southern most reaches of Italy in Palermo, Sicily, and the island of Lampedusa and in the Mediterranean Sea. We speak for the hour about migration across the sea, what drives and draws people to make the treacherous journey, state, para state and civil institutions on both sides of the sea engaging the issue of crossings and other topics.
Set Adrift on Memory Bliss (instrumental radio edition) by PM Dawn
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Transcription
J: So I’m Jasmine pronouns she/her, and I’m part of Maldusa Cultural Association in Italy, and a researcher in anthropology currently based, mainly, in Italy.
TFSR: And is the subject matter of your research and anthropology related to the work that Maldusa is engaged in?
J: Yeah, it is. My research is about civil search and rescue organizations in the Central Mediterranean Sea. And I actually carried out these research through deep participation on board of some ships. And I would say that actually, while I was doing my ethnography, I somehow became a rescuer myself. I was not really involved in this kind of topics and activities before, but then since 2019, it has become, definitely, the main part of my life. And Maldusa is an association that is absolutely focused on solidarity to freedom of movement, and to people on the move. So yeah, my research and my activities with Maldusa are absolutely related, I would say.
TFSR: Yeah. Can you talk about what material and cultural work it does and also this concept of “freedom of movement”, and why that’s important?
J: Yeah. So Maldusa is a cultural association based in Palermo in Sicily and Lampedusa, a very small Italian island that actually is much closer to Tunisia than to Italy, and that is sadly famous for being the “migrant’s island” because it’s actually one of the main point of arrivals in Italy from the North Africa.
With Maldusa we started actually not even one year ago so we are a very new, young organization. Our first aim is to create infrastructures for solidarity to people on the move. What does that mean? First of all, to practically, in Lampedusa, and in Palermo, do qualitative research and documentation, trying to denounce the deadly management of borders in Europe and specifically in Italy. Lampedusa is a very clear example of mismanagement. If in Palermo, we have a space, that is, let’s say, a material space in which we try to make together different struggles with different communities and we try to let them overlap and cross each other, creating events together, and to dialogue with the shared topics and to make shared announcements.
At the same time, in Lampedusa, we try with our presence on the ground, to be critical and political gaze on what is going on there. Because actually, it’s full of humanitarian organizations or European agency taking care of asylum procedures or migrants reception, but what was missing was a bit of critical political presence and to be active on the ground. That means, how do you say, how to understand on the one hand what is needed to the people that crossed the island. And so, to try to see these needs and to respond to that, and to claim for the respect of rights on the one hand, but also for the tools that people need to cross in a dignified way, in a safe way, the path they want to cross.
In Lampedusa we organize cultural events, we try also to get involved a bit with the part of the population on the island, and to build together some shared perspective, critical perspective: on migration, on management of the borders, management of migration and so on. We also aim to have a presence at sea to document and testimony the continuum of border violence, that is at land, but it’s also at sea. We refer to this concept of “freedom of movement”, that is also part of our slogan, of course, taking the concept from the transport of struggles ongoing for I mean many years, but also practically thinking that we would like to build a world in which actually, there are no borders used as a tool of separation, exclusion or control of people.
All people, so not only people, all the people should move or stay as they want, as they can. There is no reason why I, with my privileged Italian passport that I have with no efforts, can go wherever and someone else just because they’re born somewhere else, cannot. The point is not only about the refugees, statutes or conventions or visas themselves… Not about the technical, legal details. Ours is more a political struggle. That means that we want to fight for a world in which everyone has the freedom to stay, to live, to move.
Of course it’s necessary to deal with reality in daily life. And so of course, there are borders, there are nation states, there is all the apparatus from the national state and we actually do deal with that every day. Every time we have to give tools to the people to facilitate the path, we actually do that, but because we have to do a lot of compromises in the practical, daily life, we want to at least propose and to think and try to challenge the reality, thinking — maybe a bit utopic, but still — kind of world in which there is not this kind of tool to exclude and control.
TFSR: That kind of cultural and imaginary work feels very important, as well as the dialogical element of engaging with the people and asking what their needs are and working to come to an understanding. And the people who live there also have needs, obviously, as well who have been living in Palermo and Lampedusa.
You mentioned that there are other organizations that are doing work in the same areas as you all are. A couple of others that come to my mind and that I’ve heard of are Sea Watch and Alarm Phone. I wonder if you could tell us, does Maldusa relate to those projects, maybe a little bit about what they are and what they do?
J: Yeah, sure. Maldusa is actually made of individuals that are coming from different organizations with at least a background of search and rescue — civil search and rescue — activities or experiences, or different networks of solidarity to people on the move. For example, there are people of Alarm Phone, as you said, of the Baye Fall community that is based in Palermo, but also from the Louise Michel organization and from Mediterranea Saving Humans, that is our Italian search and rescue organization. In Malduda there are not people who are directly involved in Sea Watch but we are part of the same family.
So, Alarm Phone is a hotline that was created in 2014 And they receive calls of distress, and they relay them to the authorities or to NGOs, to push the authorities to do what they have to do and it’s a completely volunteer organization. These people are doing shifts there all day all night, and try to support and amplify the voices of those in danger at sea, who are in risk of not being assisted. So they don’t directly work at sea but they are one of the most important support organizations to cooperate for search and rescue.
On the other hand, the other organization you mentioned, Sea Watch, is one of the biggest more important organization of search and rescue in the Civil Fleet, as we call the fleet of the civil actors active in the Central Mediterranean. They are mainly from Germany and they are one of the biggest organizations and they are at sea since 2015, if I’m not wrong. So also one of the older of the family [laughs].
But as I said so far Maldusa is very young. I can say that in this moment those who created Maldusa were coming mainly from: Mediterranea Saving Humans, Louise Michel, Alarm Phone and Baye Fall people. But of course, if tomorrow there is anyone from other organization who wants to participate with us in this political program, we are more than open and we want absolutely to be part of this collaboration process.
TFSR: Could you give a brief background on the immigration from over the last decades since the so-called Arab Spring and civil wars across North Africa and West Asia, and how these movements of people have shaped the European border regime?
J: For sure my answer will not be correct [laughs]. It will be just a little piece and I think it’s a very complex question. But briefly, I will try. After 2011 and then after 2015, for sure, Europe had to deal in a different way with migration. At least different from how it was before. “Fortress Europe” had been building her walls since the ‘90s, externalizing the frontiers and the violence to assure a kind of safety inside (in a way that I would define as a clearly a white western colonizer). But in the last years the situation has become very visible, more visible than before.
I think that it’s also useful, when we think about Europe, to use also the metaphor, not only of the fortress, but also the one of the future. It’s not actually closed to everyone. I mean, goods and rich people can always move everywhere. And actually also poor people, Black people from the south — it’s not that they cannot enter. They cannot enter legally, but actually, exactly creating this way of, how to say…I mean what European governments are doing is exactly to create the condition to put people in danger to arrive in Europe and then to let them die in this danger as it is happening in this moment in the central Mediterranean or elsewhere. Or on the other hand, to put them in the position that once they arrive to be exploited, for example, with in the black market.
I would use these two levels to read the complexity of the situation. There are several conventions for refugees. I mean, Europe is always sold as the continent of human rights and reception and welcome countless. But most of the conventions we have are actually absolutely old fashioned, and are not able to deal with the reality we are facing in this moment. For example the convention of Genoa from 1951, that is absolutely important, and it’s the one that is defining the status of refugees. That is fundamental to define who can enter and how and for which purpose, but actually it’s very old. It refers to individuals, and it was thought up after the second World War. Today, you cannot think of, as an individual phenomenon, the one of migration. The refugee status was not created about migration as it is today.
On the other hand, another important convention is the Dublin Convention that says that people have to obtain documents, more or less, in the first country in Europe they arrive. That is crazy because, of course, geographically speaking there are so few countries in which people arrive. It doesn’t make any sense to push them and to force them to stay there until they obtain the documents.
I would say that the point is that there have been a lot of changes since 2011, also the people who arrived have changed a lot. For example, there was a majority of quite young male coming 10 years ago, and today we have an absolutely high number of women with children. Often they are alone. Maybe they are the wife of the man that arrived 10 years ago. But I don’t want to talk about numbers, that’s not the point. I just want to say that people will change, routes will change and most probably also the reason to move will change. Still, in this moment in Europe, we don’t have a proper way to deal with this strange thing called migration. And so it has changed a lot but I would say that what I can see is that the management is even more securitarian and deadly.
TFSR: Can you talk a little bit about some of the people that are coming now and what’s motivating them, some of the countries that you’re seeing a lot of people come from, some of the motivations that they’ve spoken about, or some of the things that they’re either moving towards or moving away from?
J: In this moment the roots are changing a lot. For example: in Italy, until a year ago, people were mainly coming from Libya, where they were forced, sometimes for a year, to stay in centers of detention. But in the last year something has changed and this route has moved a lot to Tunisia. So in this moment we have a lot, not only of Tunisian people — that was our old story — but also sub-Saharan people coming towards Europe from Tunisia.
That’s quite interesting because sometimes they arrive in Tunisia with flights because Tunisia has some visa agreements with different countries. Some people can just arrive from sub-Saharan countries with a flight, or sometimes they come by foot from Algeria. Sometimes in very different ways, sometimes from Libya…different routes. I think that Tunisia is still one of the main countriues where people are coming from and Cote d’Ivoire, and Cameroon, Gambia, Senegal are, more or less, part of the main people in in the Tunisian route. But of course, there are still Bangladeshi, Syrian and Syriac from the east side. I’m not talking about the Balkan route, that is another topic, but in the central Med, these are the main nationalities.
Some of these countries are countries with war. We can talk about it or not, but what I want to say is that a lot of the countries where these people are coming from are exactly the countries that in Italy we consider “safe countries of origin”. And it means that actually maybe there is no war, but maybe LGBTQ rights are not respected, for example. Or maybe it is very tough social or economic crisis but that’s just not recognized. It’s not only about war, it’s also about social economical situations.
I would also like to stress the point that it’s not about only desperation when people decide to leave: it’s also about desires and imaginations and dreams. Exactly as I decided to go to France to do my master — and I can — it should be possible for all of that of them to just say, “Hey, I want to live [there]. Today I will go to the embassy and tomorrow, live [there]”. The point is that they can’t because the visa management and political policies are really making it impossible for most of the people from these countries to come. These illegal routes are actually not necessarily coming from desperate situations, it’s just that it’s impossible to come here in a legal way even if you just want to study, even if you are coming from quite well-off family.
Of course there are several very tough and problematic situations, and we should also take our neocolonial, economic responsibility in most of the countries in Africa. We have to look at that and understand it and maybe learn something. At the same time, I think it’s very important to see that sometimes it’s absolutely not about war or desperation.
TFSR: For clarification, when we’ve talked on the show about the colonial or neocolonial relationship with countries that we see a majority of immigrants coming to the US from, they tend to be in Latin America. The United States has had a policy since the early 1800s of, to varying degrees, controlling markets, labor and political formations throughout this hemisphere to the exclusion of, for the most part, European powers. We talk about the relationship that the US has had — particularly in the 20th century — of destabilizing political formations, governments, nation states, or social movements that have had interests that run counter to parts of the ruling classes, depending on what time and what place in the United States.
I wonder if you could say a few things about that sort of relationship that Italy has with North Africa, or that people in Europe have with some of the countries and the sort of, what Walter Rodney talked about with the under development of former colonies and the wealth that’s existent within the walls of Fortress Europe?
J: Yeah—
TFSR: — I just sprung it on you so if you don’t want to answer that, that’s okay.
J: No no, don’t worry. We’ll try, and then we’ll see. I would say that actually it’s even more related than you asked, somehow. If you think, for example, about the relation between France and Tunisia, or France and Algeria, of course, it’s really not so old, actually. The same if you think about Senegal and France, or even if you think about Italy and Eritrea.
In Italy we have this big problem that [we believe] colonialism never existed somehow, and we don’t recognize it, we don’t know anything about it. I mean, it’s true that most probably, we failed even in being colonizers, but still, it’s quite interesting to see also the different relations that are going on in Africa because of our colonization. For example, one point that was very interesting for me — and I think can explain very well — is that for example, some Eritrean guys told us that when they were in Libya trying to reach Europe, they were treated by Libyans particularly bad. This is because when Italy was in Eritrea they were using Eritrean soldiers to occupy Libya. That’s why, somehow, this colonial past is coming again. That Eritrea is actually facing for a second time, this Italian past on them.
That’s just an example that is also a bit symbolic, and maybe also a narrative one somehow. Still, it was very strong when someone tells you exactly this. I think we also always have to keep together one level that is about imaginaries, and one that is about practices. So I’m not sure that every person that decides to leave Senegal has a very clear understanding or political position against French colonizers. I’m not sure about that. But I would also say that I don’t care so much, because I think that’s not the point. I don’t know if in the practices, in the everyday practices, they directly fight against this. The point is that in the wider geopolitical relationship we can still see that very well.
I’m an anthropologist, so usually I work with imaginaries, and with cultural parts of people. For me, the main point is also to understand why Europe is the place where people want to go. I mean, it’s actually easy, no? We spent a lot of time to explain them that somehow our place was better than theirs. Of course, at some point, most probably people will want to join us. It’s interesting to see how they sometimes shape the idea of Europe, or the idea of what they will find here, or how they deal with the storytelling about what they find in Europe to their families that stay there. And, of course, the narration of what they found sometimes is very far away from reality. So again, I think that the point is, how to say, a cultural colonialization, and that’s what we have to fight firstly.
TFSR: Yeah, you’ve mentioned the management of immigration, and how-how it’s being engaged and the material side of this from-from the European side of things. As you say, the-the routes that are taken across the water, or through the Balkans, or what have you, changed according to policy changes, and political shifts of the governments that have hegemony in those areas.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about who’s opposing the immigrant boats, what coast guards— I’ve heard about, recently, Greece re-depositing people back in the Mediterranean or people trying to force the Italian government to engage and try to save people. Or there’s also Frontex as an agency, which a lot of people in my audience, mostly in North America, are maybe not familiar with that. But there’s also right wing endeavors; there was, back in the 2017-2018 period, right wing civil society groups that were going out into the ocean and attempting to disrupt people’s routes north.
I wonder if you could just talk about it like this. If you want to talk about the imaginary of what, besides the bureaucracy in the rules that they’re facing, like, what they’re so afraid of?
J: Yeah. So I would say that it’s a bit different in different countries. The situation about the Coast Guard in Italy, for example, is quite different from the one in Greece. But yeah, let’s try to say something general. Or no, I will go specifically and then I will go general later.
For sure, yes, in Greece there is a situation that is quite tough. We have some evidences from some days ago actually, of coast guards taking people from land, taking them on a boat and then leaving them at sea. That’s crazy, it’s unbelievable, but that’s true.
Also Frontex, that is the European agency for border and coast control. There are evidences that has facilitated this kind of “pushback” or “pullback” that are absolutely illegal considering international law in Europe. That’s the same that actually is happening with the so-called Libyan coast guard. I say “so-called” because the civil actors operating at sea in the central Med, we don’t recognize the Libyan Coast Guard as a Coast Guard. Firstly, because they don’t have a proper structure, they are not trained to really save lives, but more to enforce law. And what they do is not rescue, but just pullback. And that’s exactly what Italy is financing, giving a lot of money and tools and ships and people and trainings.
The idea is, what I said before, to externalize this management, “out of sight, out of mind”. Even if in Italy the Coast Guard is absolutely doing a great job and actually rescuing a lot of people, still the government is absolutely facilitating the pullback in Libya. Actually the same thing is going on that was with Tunisia. That is a new thing, because interceptions from the Tunisian Coast Guard is a kind of new thing. But of course, with increasing numbers of people coming from Tunisia, Italy is now having new agreements with Tunisia also to reinforce the tools of…sorry, it’s not the Coast Guard of Tunisia, it’s Garde Nationale which actually is police. So, again, it’s not search and rescue, it’s not saving life, it’s law enforcement.
So I think that’s also quite interesting, because what they do is they can’t, I mean, their ships are not built to the rescue. And that’s why also, most of the times they create shipwrecks and people die just because they are approaching them. I think that is one of the points that is directly related to the externalization, and then it becomes very practical and technical, but is absolutely related to what actually right [wing] movements and right parties actually feel even at land.
So, I cannot give an answer, of course, of why they fear. I mean, there are several theories, there are several understandings. I feel that I’m so deep and so new in this situation that I cannot really judge. We have to consider some kind of uncertainty and crisis that still, even if it’s very different, but also in Italy, somehow it’s going on. And this struggle among the poorest is something that is absolutely not new.
I really don’t want to give banal answers, so I will not give an answer about this. But it’s clear that it has also changed again, since 2017-2018. Because when, for example, in Italy, in 2017, the were the first measures criminalizing the humanitarian solidarity. There was also a big wave of solidarity coming back. Today, we still have another very right wing government, but the reaction from the civil society is quite different. I would say that, on the one hand, maybe is less polarized as a discussion because when, in 2018, the discussion was very, very polarized and maybe also simplified.
Nowadays, I would say that it’s a bit more complicated. Our government is also acting in a very interesting way because on the one hand: they are completely dismantling and destroying the reception system, and they are claiming to work for the arrest of all the traffickers all over the world and to block all the ships and something like this. But then if you see the Coast Guard has made more rescue in the last six months since there is the new government, than in the last years. They are also going much further south, outside of the Italian search and rescue zone in the Maltese zone one to do the rescues.
I didn’t say anything about Malta, that is another interesting case. We have a lot of cases where Malta is collaborating directly with Libya to organize pullbacks against any laws, any rights, anything. But again it’s very complex and it’s very…sometimes invisible, what is going on.
I think that what is interesting now is that, of course, for me, for “the people of the bubble”, we say, that is a very big topic. But I would say that it’s very different from 2018, when it was our public opinion topic. Nowadays a bit different, and even if there was, as you probably know, this big shipwreck in Crotone, in Italy, in Calabria. It was something very strong, very powerful because it was very close to the coast of Italy. I think it has somehow changed something now in the government measures. But still, we’re not in the same situation of 2018 and so the reaction is different.
TFSR: So if you’re seeing more rescues by the Italian Coast Guard, for instance, but the central government is dismantling the reception centers, where are people going? Are they just being immediately deported back to quote unquote, “Safe Third Party” countries?
J: That would be the idea. They declared this so they would like to increase the deportations. We are in the situation in which we are really interested in understanding how they want to do that, and also considering that they have, I guess, no funds to do that. But still, one month ago Italy declared the state of emergency about migration and it needs to have a lot of funds to manage the “emergency”, so-called, that is absolutely not an emergency. It’s a political choice, but still, they call it like this [an emergency].
We can see, for example, in Lampedusa, that with this state of emergency decrees, actually they change it. For example, the management of the hotspot that is there for the first reception of the people on the move, and actually they put Italian Red Cross as the manager. In two weeks they changed everything, okay? They destroyed and rebuilt the construction. They put a lot of new services and new things, saying that for them, the aim is to give out dignified reception to these people. Because one of the points in Lampedusa is that these hotspots get super overcrowded because the transfers to Sicily are very slow, and not every day, and etc. Now they are trying to do transfer everyday with flights, with ferries, with whatever.
On the one hand you can say that with the “state of emergency”, it’s giving some of the basic tools that actually we were forced to call for, because they were not there, not even them. They are giving these basic services and so we are happy, because people will find a more dignified situation once they arrive. But the point is that it’s the management itself that is not working. You cannot put people in prison, because they are in prison.
It’s tricky to go against something that starts to work in a way that is dignified. Let’s see how it works and let’s see also what happens to the people because it’s news from yesterday that they maybe want to build a center for repatriation in Lampedusa itself. So you know, let’s see what will happen. We are here exactly to, how to say, to observe and to be ready to denounce.
TFSR: [chuckles]
So you’ve talked about how it’s a very particular situation, and very changing and shifting with the independent national governments of the countries that lined the European coast. Can you talk a little bit about how that border area looks along the ocean? I’m sure that there’s a lot of arguments around national autonomy by the countries that are along the border that might conflict with a border organization that is not controlled by the populations, or by the national governments, directly, of those places. And can you talk a little bit about Frontex and how Frontex operates, and where it kind of fits in relation to these coast guards?
J: Yeah, so actually, I would say that this situation is somehow easier than whatfs we could expect. For what is our interest now, we have national waters, and we have international waters. We have search and rescue zones, and a search and rescue zone is a part of the water of the sea, in which a state has the duty to coordinate search and rescue operations.
The search and rescue zone overlaps with the international waters. For example, Italian search and rescue zones has a part of it that is in international waters and a part of it that is in the Italian national waters. Of course in the national waters it will be the state to take care of search and rescue. In the part of the international waters, that would be otherwise empty and with no control, every state can decide by themselves and declare which are the coordinates of the zone they want to take care of. It doesn’t mean that they are the only one allowed to do the search rescue, or they are the only one who can coordinate. No, it’s just that they are the one in charge of that once they are called to do that.
Usually the national Coast Guard is acting of course in the national waters and then in the search and rescue area of that nation. That means it’s international waters. Of course, there is no search rescue zone of one state overlapping with the National waters of another state. That’s clear. So in this scenario, at the moment, that situation is that every state can declare their own search and rescue area and they just need to have a center for the coordination of it at land.
In 2018, Libya, because of all the financing and the help of Italy, was in the position to declare their search and rescue zone that is absolutely huge and impossible for them to actually control and to actually be effective during rescue. That’s quite similar also for Malta; they have a huge search and rescue zone and they never go out. The situation is that, at the end of the day, there is actually miles and miles in which nobody does search and rescue, but most important, actually nobody take the command about the coordination of the search and rescue.
Frontex actually is collaborating with the European countries, technically, to control the borders and to enforce the law of controlling the borders. What they told us is that they cannot enter in the Tunisian territorial waters but of course, once they are international waters, and in European search and rescue areas, they should collaborate with the authorities.
Say that they found a boat in distress. What happens is that they must do that [collaborate] but we don’t know what civil society and the main problematic thing is that actually, not only they collaborate with, for example, the Libyan coast guard to facilitate the pullbacks but they don’t communicate with search and rescue civil organizations. That means that in a lot of cases even if there are NGOs out at sea, able to the rescue, because Frontex was not communicating about the case they were pulled back or they just sunk. So the point is exactly this, and it’s between facilitating pullbacks and not communicating, and so facilitating shipwrecks.
TFSR: God, that’s so dire [a long pause and a sigh].
So you had mentioned how the newer, explicitly right wing government in Italy has been changing the reception and the processing of migrants who are seeking refuge, or trying to transit through Italy at least. That’s a concrete example of a shift in, maybe not spoken policy, but concrete policy. Do you see much of a big difference between leftist regimes and right wing regimes, or centrist regimes in Italy, for instance, where you’re based in terms of policies towards immigration, is there like a big shift according to how this is engaged? Or do you see, at the national level, the bureaucracy just sort of entrenched and exists throughout different political electoral turns?
J: Quite interesting question because the answer is much complicated. I would say that I didn’t see so much shift from right to left and then right again, parties or the government. I’m not sure it’s just because of bureaucracy that is actually pervading everything. I would say that the problem is that, I mean, left wing parties in Italy are not really left wing parties. I remember that one of the first bases for criminalization of solidarity was in 2017 with our left wing government in Italy. So, I think that what happened later was this game of right, left, right, left, but actually, I mean, the process was just going on.
I think there is also another level, and I would say that the point is a more neoliberal securitarian way to manage migration and doesn’t matter if it’s right or left. I would also say that bureaucracy is actually something that is going everywhere and it’s becoming much more difficult for the ones who would like to change something and to oppose some laws to do that. It’s really becoming a technical thing. But that’s the point. In my personal perspective of course it’s very important to fight against technicalities and to go against them and to claim some change. Still, one of the main problems about management of migration is that it’s becoming a really technical, juridical struggle.
In Italy, we can talk a lot about how radical power can be in juridical struggles. And we can talk about how laws can go against the state and whatever. Specifically about the sea is quite interesting because you can play with different levels of law; with international law, the national, and so on. I think it’s important to focus on the fact that we have to have in mind a political struggle that is different than the technical one, and to keep them together is quite tricky.
I think that sometimes humanitarian organization and solidarity organizations lose a bit of this point, because it’s a very complex moment to do that. On the one hand you are attacked as a humanitarian worker, so the… I don’t know how to say, but the level [of discourse] is becoming lower and lower. The political chance to change something, to talk about real radical change and revolution is really, really taken apart. And I think it’s exactly the game they want to play.
TFSR: I wonder if we couldn’t jump back to the-to the work of Maldusa. Can you talk about some of the ways that you’ve engaged with some of the people in Lampedusa or in Palermo who aren’t transiting through, around the issues of migration? How have you found those who’ve grown up on the islands, or in the area, to be engaging with this dynamic and with the people coming through?
J: Sorry, you mean the people of Maldusa? Or you mean the people in Lampedusa engaging with organizations?
TFSR: The people in Lampedusa. It sounded like before you were talking about working around the imaginary, working around the cultural and political side of migration, of freedom of movement. There’s, you know. the people that are coming through, there’s the government that’s engaging, there’s the NGOs and civil society groups, but there’s also the people that live in the area also, and I’m wondering, are you finding that people that are living there are feeling conflicted? Are they feeling welcoming? I mean, I’m sure they’re feeling lots of ways because they’re people and they’re complex, but…
J: Yeah. The first time I arrived in Lampedusa I was expecting an island, and a kind of population like a bubble. Also because they are like 5,000 people and 1,200 are different officials, 1,200 and only 5,000. So I thought okay, “3,500 people, they will all know each other and they will all be friends”. Come on. Not true. In Lampedusa there are really several different perspectives, different points of view. Of course, it’s obvious because we are all different human beings. But what was very interesting is that there is actually not one “island of Lampedusa position” about migration.
Lampedusa has been, as every newspaper says, “island of solidarity” for a long time. That’s actually true. I mean, there were a lot of people that just for this human compassion, were just going out and saving people from the water. And then maybe hosting them at their place and giving them the possibility to have a shower, to cut their hair and to just being with them. That was around, I would say until 2013.
Then after the big shipwreck of 2013, the 3rd of October, something has changed completely. Lampedusa became “the island of the shipwreck”, but also the island of the European management of migration in Lampedusa. And it became the island of the boarder, the island of the frontiers, and it became a militarized area. It was already, but in that moment something has changed more and more. What most of the people in Lampedusa say is that somehow Europe, or the state — usually they say the State — took away from them the management of migration. That’s exactly why, now, they don’t feel engaged to that. And so the reaction today are, “I don’t care”, “They should die”, or “It’s not my problem”. There is very few people who are still actually engaged in solidarity and taking care in the daily life of this.
The feeling that I have — and it’s my perspective, okay, I cannot talk for them — but it’s a kind of tiredness and exasperation because, one the one hand, they feel abandoned from the state, and on the other hand, to be over-controlled by the state. Because, for example, in Lampedusa, they don’t have a hospital. And, of course, for people it’s quite tough to not have a hospital. You could say “okay but actually, if you see other islands in Italy with the same numbers, same people, bla bla bla, there are other islands in Italy with no hospital”. But Lampedusa is one of the most distant islands from Italy. It means that you if you have any kind of emergency, you have to take a flight of one hour, or 12 hours ferry. That’s not easy. Since the ‘90s in Lampedusa babies cannot get born. I mean, women cannot deliver in Lampedusa.
The question is — this is a famous question, no? — “why can migrants have a hospital in the hotspot and we can’t? Why can migrants be transferred for free and we have to pay?” A lot of questions in which actually was created that kind of competition. I mean, it’s a very usual way, not to manage.
Another point is also that I felt a lot of kind of conspiracy theories. When you feel abandoned from the state you have to explain reality in a different way and you have to find answers to your questions. I think that is true sometimes when they say something like “racist people, southern Italian people”, there is something about this. But actually it is more complex than this.The is also people who learn how to exploit it this and so they created a kind of business on that. And of course, I mean, the management is also a business for them on the island, if you think about food, supplies, or whatever. Of course, also people of the island earn money from this.
Also the tourism. A lot of tourists come to Lampedusa because they want to see Black people. They want to see the disembarkations. There are several people taking pictures of them with swimsuits and with a partner on the beach — beautiful beaches in Lampedusa — close to the shipwreck boat. And that’s creepy, no?! But, still, there are people who buy their flight Lampedusa because they want to see migrants, and they are disappointed when they cannot see them because actually they are all imprisoned in the hotspot.
I think there are several dynamics, several tensions, and I would say you can find everything in Lampedusa. You can find the most activist person and you can find the very racist person. I think that these are very deeply intertwined currents in Lampedusa, and it’s a very clear symbol of how you should not manage a border.
TFSR: Well, that’s the questions that I had for you. I wonder, was there anything that I didn’t ask about that you think we should talk about right now? While-while we’re on this-this call?
J: Actually I feel we talk a lot of things [laughs]. I mean, so far. I don’t feel something that I need to say,
TFSR: Okay. I didn’t know if there were glaring holes in the questions that I asked.
Thank you very much for having this conversation, taking the time and for the work that you do. I really appreciate it. There’s the website and I’ll link that, I think it’s just www.maldusa.org/en. Are there any other ways that people can follow or make donations to support the work that you’re doing?
J: Yeah, so there is a Facebook, Twitter and Instagram page and they are all Maldusa Project. And for donations we have, in the website, we have a page that is ”Support us” and there are the details in case they want to do that.
TFSR: All right. Well, thank you so much, and take care of yourself.
In this discussion, we talk with two trans organizers in Missouri about the recently withdrawn emergency rule made by the state Attorney General Andrew Bailey. At the time, the emergency rule, which was one of the most far reaching bans on trans access to affirming medical care, had been stayed by the courts and was awaiting further hearing.
The Attorney General withdrew the ruling, claiming that it was no longer needed because the Missouri legislature had passed two bills that removed access to trans care for youth. The situation on the ground in Missouri is still dire, but the particular extremity of the rule has at least temporarily been dodged. (Just after, Gov. DeSantis in Florida introduced a flurry of new anti-trans legislation as if to outstrip Missouri in hateful targeting). During this conversation, we discuss the specific details that made this rule significantly threatening, as well as the various reactions and organizing efforts that it provoked. Though the situation has changed in Missouri, the discussion still holds important insight for those of us committed to the struggle against the state’s gender fascism, since this is a coordinated effort by the Republican party across state lines to wield violent power against specific populations deemed disposable. I will also read a statement by the organizers written in the wake of the withdrawal of the rule.
You can find the guests at Mid Missouri Trans Folks on instagram and venmo.
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Transcription
TFSR: In this discussion, we talk with two trans organizers in Missouri about the recently withdrawn emergency rule made by the State Attorney General, Andrew Bailey. At the time the emergency rule, which was one of the most far reaching bans on trans access to affirming medical care had been stayed by the courts and was awaiting further hearing. The Attorney General withdrew the ruling claiming that was no longer necessary because the Missouri legislature had just passed two bills, removing access to trans care for youth. The situation on the ground in Missouri is still dire, but the particular extremity of the rule has at least temporarily been dodged. Just after this governor DeSantis and Florida introduced a flurry of new anti trans legislation as if to outstrip what Missouri had been doing in its hateful targeting.
During this conversation, we discussed the specific details that made this rule significantly threatening, as well as the various reactions and organizing efforts that it provoked. Though the situation has changed in Missouri, this discussion still holds important insight for those of us committed to the struggle against the State’s gender fascism. Since this is a coordinated effort by the Republican Party across state lines to wield violent power against specific populations deemed disposable. I will also read a statement by the organizers written in the wake of the withdrawal of this rule.
So can you please introduce yourselves with whatever names, and pronouns you’d like to use, and any affiliation you want to name for us?
Wanda Watermelon: I’m Wanda watermelon, she/her, and I guess I’m with the Mid MO Trans Folks.
caine: I’m caine, he/they, I’m also with Mid MO Trans Folks, and I’m an art teacher.
TFSR: Thank you so much for coming and talking with us. It’s around really difficult stuff, but I think it’s important to get some information out there. So can we start off just by talking about the emergency rule that the Attorney General made in Missouri, and what it contains, what makes it different than other anti trans policies we’ve seen in other states, and how it’s being interpreted or implemented?
caine: All right, one of these subtopics at a time for me. So what does it contain? It is not necessarily clear what the facts the individual statements in the emergency order will happen. That’s one of the things about it that’s different. It seems to be primarily targeting doctors. It opens them up to massive liability, which has been a common right wing tactic right now. It’s trying to get them to stop offering things of their own accord, in addition to having some pretty serious potential legal consequences within the order, depending on how it gets executed. It’s currently in stasis… a restraining order until July or until we get another ruling. Do you have more on that one?
WW: Yeah. So there is some specific language in the law that I think created a lot of extreme anxiety for those of us inside the state. I think in the wider trans community as well. Namely, the term social contagion is used.
caine: That’s a question later down. We’re gonna go off at length about that.
WW: So, that, and just how the language seemed very targeted to people with existing comorbidities in terms of mental diagnoses. Specifically, autism and anxiety, are the two that are named in the order, as well as social media addiction. So those are some ways it’s kind of different.
In terms of how it’s supposed to be interpreted, or implemented, we do know from some comrades in working in Planned Parenthood within the State kind of how those things look. People are able to self report that they’ve had X amount of therapy, which is one of the requirements for continuing care, there’s a tool they’re using to screen people for the social media addiction, and that’s only for youth.
caine: Okay, good. That was not necessarily clear right away, either.
WW: This is just how Planned Parenthood’s legal department is interpreting how they’re going to continue care. Planned Parenthood has money to defend themselves legally. So they’re not as at risk as independent providers who may interpret these laws in more radical ways to protect themselves from liability.
caine: Do you know if they’re still going to go ahead with doing that since its own restraining order?
WW: No, they won’t be implementing any of those things in the order until the order itself has passed. They just kind of preemptively were getting ready, what they would do, how they would screen people. There’s an autism screening that’s also part of that. But that’s another thing where people can self report.
TFSR: Wasn’t there some language about if people had died if they were taken hormones, or if you knew anyone who had committed suicide.
caine: So there is a separate [thing]. They released the anti trans emergency order, they released a bill targeting children, and then they also a few days later released a form, a bounty form that encouraged people to turn in doctors that were doing trans care. I don’t remember, there probably was some language about suicidality in the actual order, but I know that that was something they were looking for reports on.
To go back to the question, one of the things that makes it different is that this one was broader and targeting adults and comorbidities very explicitly, which has always been part of the plan for this legislation. They started targeting sports, literally to get people comfortable talking about anti trans issues, and they’ve moved on to medical bans with the eventual goal to remove the and de-transition all adults and to remove the possibility of trans care in the entire country. As part of that they are soliciting that kind of data. At the same time, not related to these bills, one of the senators is targeting Washington University with the equivalent of slap laws. I’m forgetting the word but it’s intended to make them not be able to operate. Its reports for information on the trans care they’re currently providing to minors. All of it is about the the merest surface level addressing excuses to remove our care, if that makes sense. So they will be soliciting information on suicidality in order to exaggerate the effects, and they don’t care about the fact that removing trans care is most likely to increase those effects.
TFSR: Right. I mean, that’s interesting. A couple of things that I’m noticing that are different, this goes straight for all trans people. It’s not starting with trans youth, which is something we’ve seen in other states. Then also you’re talking about how part of this ruling is a way of collecting data, like biometric data on trans people. Do you have any thoughts on either of those? Anymore thoughts on the data collection or how they just went straight for all trans people?
caine: Bailey, that’s the Attorney General, chose to do this by executive order, which itself was unusual. He’s gotten some criticism from his own side for basically jumping the gun and going too hard too early. Because that’s allowed people to push back and see what they’re doing kind of nakedly.
In terms of collecting data, I don’t remember how much of it is in the order, but part of that questionnaire, and notably that questionnaire was on the Attorney General’s website, was report doctors. It said, “if you had any concerns about trans care that you were aware of” and it allowed people to report from out of state. So it’s very much one of these, similar to the anti abortion bounty laws. It was a data collection portal for that specific thing. It was taken down pretty immediately because a bunch of hackers spammed it, and they couldn’t keep it functioning… which, thank fuck.
The other efforts are Josh Hawley trying to get data from WashU and they’re just scraping any medical data that they possibly can. I don’t know how much of that is to collect data on individuals. I do know that some of it is to prevent the institutions providing care from being able to function, because having to collect just distracts resources from the ability of providing the service they’re there to provide. I assume they’re going to use it for terrible purposes, but I have no idea what those are right now.
TFSR: Yeah, thank you. I’m curious about how the ruling was received in the state by cis and trans communities. One thing that I’ve heard was a lot of people talking about how incoherent that ruling is and you’ve talked a little bit about that. But can you describe what you saw on the ground in terms of response?
WW: Yeah, so in a greater sense, the way this stuff is going as the fascist creep progresses and more and more of these laws are coming out. They’re this dual thing to where people are numb to it because it’s happening on the daily. Every day there’s new laws, every day there’s a new mass shooting, and attention spans are short. But for those of us who are on the receiving end of these laws and bills, it’s psychologically really damaging because they get sensationalized. A lot of the information that gets shared about them is headlines that are highlighting parts of bills that may or may not be legible in a way that people know how to react or actually know what the threat level is.
This bill in particular, I remember the first couple of days, we were just like, “Okay, well, everyone in our polycule is autistic and takes hormones, so does that mean we all need to flee the state immediately?” There’s a lot of fear that they’re trying to get people to go get diagnosed and then bar them from care based on those diagnoses. So, we see a liberal response of a lot of people trying to run out and get these doctor’s notes and get autism diagnoses and then the same time like, it’s unclear whether or not that’s going to bar people from future care.
One thing with Planned Parenthood, the way they were going to screen for social media addiction was that if a youth reported that they had it, they would be barred from care for three years before they could take the test again. It’s a matter of answering a survey, like, “Do you feel like you spend time on on Instagram compulsively?” We can tell a kid to go in and say, ‘no’ to that question, but only because we got the inside scoop from a Planned Parenthood employee. So the ways these laws are implemented and the way that we receive them initially through social media, it’s really psychologically damaging. Then we’re trying to be, as a community of people with different ability levels and different neuro divergences, we’re trying to keep level heads, figure out how to read through these laws and interpret them, or reach out to people who know how to do that. So that we can even have an objective basis from which to start organizing and resistance.
caine: And not get totally overwhelmed. The social media thing, in particular, is extremely insidious, because we’re a disparate community. In cities, you can find a bunch of us together, but if you’re a young rural person, and you don’t have a community around you, then social media was how you found the possibility to exist as a trans person at all (which a lot of my friends talk about) and found other people like you. So the fact that they are targeting the means by which we communicate with communities outside our immediate locales, is really vicious. Everything about this particular piece of legislation, it’s not technically legislation, everything about this is really insidious.
How did it get received by cis and trans communities? Cis communities didn’t realize it was happening. The news that most cis people get do not cover this. If they do, they do it really both sides-y with a lot of bullshit and I have no other term for that. Cis people either had no idea it was happening, or they didn’t have accurate information about what the stakes are.
Additionally, the fact that this and other bills are partially trying to convince doctors to not offer care themselves means that it’s sort of like laundering the Republican efforts to do this. It doesn’t seem as cruel to cis people, because the doctors are the ones who are choosing not to treat us. They don’t realize how much all of this stuff is affected by their inaction, their unawareness.
How trans communities that I know of have have received it? Like if you’re in state versus out of state, there seems to be a divide. People out of state do not realize how fucking traumatic it is. I’m not the same person I was after April 13, which is when I think this happened. Everything in my life has dramatically changed in some serious ways. Some of them have involved community coming together in defiance, but the rest are pretty shitty.
WW: Yeah. I would say there’s a few things about this. The way it felt for this order to hit was we saw all the cis people around us that didn’t know anything was wrong and it felt like to all of us that we had just had our futures ripped away from us. Continuing to go to work and having people that we are supposedly in community with just totally ignorant to our plight is really hard. That is even happening inside of our own trans community, because a lot of people who don’t take hormones aren’t affected by that and don’t experience that.
Then beyond that, all of a sudden, for the first time, all of these folks in Missouri, who are folks like us, who are middle class white folks are all of a sudden fearing getting barred from care, and then reactionary stuff and try and start organizing. But the reality of that is all of these people who have been dealing with being disabled or marginalized in other ways that have barred them from care already are having to be like, “Y’all. You’re entering our space to organize resistance after you’ve abandoned us, especially in the pandemic.” The order essentially meant that, from our understanding, as organizers, that all of us were seen as being disabled because we’re trans. So that means, when we organize to resist this in Missouri and in other places, if similar language is used in laws, we have to be prioritizing the needs of immunocompromised people specifically who’ve been abandoned by us, which means doing a lot of accountability and repair work right out the gates to be able to center those voices. To find them and learn from them, because they’ve been fighting this fight. Now transness and disability justice issues, at least in our paradigm in Missouri, have become one thing.
TFSR: I’m really glad you brought that up. I was thinking about how recently, there was a victory for us. Something that was initiated by a Black trans woman who was incarcerated who was trying to get access to hormones, and was trying to get that through disability accommodations through the ADA. That was a victory for her and also maybe other incarcerated people being able to get access to hormones. But you are also in Missouri, seeing this connection between transness and disability that has the other side of that, when the state regulates who can access what, and has these terms of transness and disability that also have these negative effects, right? Because they can uncover a genocidal impulse of the state. So I’m glad you brought that up.
I’m curious what you’ve seen in terms of the overlap of disabled and trans people responding to this. What they’re asking for in terms of other people doing the organizing trying to support other trans people trying to do solidarity work, what they’re saying in terms of their needs?
caine: So my background is a lot of academic and theoretical and historical stuff, so my knowledge of this immediately goes down to possibly a less useful answer to this question, which is that transness and disability have been intertwined for a very long time, and that they have been used by the State and the nation in order to divide rifts against each other with specific regards to legislation. So the original form of the ADA was only passed because they explicitly outlined trans people as not covered by disability. There have been a lot of steps towards addressing that, but it’s important to note there, that this is something that governments do in order to separate the truly powerful forces that could make changes to them, which is coalitional activism.
In terms of what I’ve seen on the ground, I’m a little bit limited here, because I’m fairly disabled. I don’t really meet a lot of people, but everyone I know is also disabled. So I haven’t gone out because of the pandemic, because nobody was masking. We’ve started wearing masks again, which makes me slightly more comfortable. But, you know.
WW: It’s difficult again, the reality is that a lot of the folks that we hope to reach, that we see as being in similar positions to us in terms of not being able to leave, it’s hard to reach them because a lot of our friends that have been sheltering the whole time have just been completely alienated from community and have seen a lot of the other trans folks just do their own thing, go out to super spreader events, not take any of that seriously. So there’s a lot of trepidation. What we’re saying is, “Well, okay, well, they’re trying to do eugenics to us now, too. So sorry, we missed out on giving a shit about you, and we had the chance.” But that’s not an easy thing to overcome. So, it’s difficult and a lot of this is happening to happen. The order hit and we were like, “Shit, we gotta get our eggs in a row.” Then the reality of what this work is very slowly meeting people one by one, often parasocially, often at the speed of trust, which is a slow thing.
One thing I really want to want to say is that I hope that other communities across the country, start organizing, build community pharmacies, build up their infrastructure, so they don’t have to do what a lot of us who weren’t already experiencing this kind of crackdown from the government had to do, which is like, “Oh, shit, I guess we got to get our get our eggs in a row now and talk to each other.” We can start now. The reality is like, this shit keeps escalating, if we get a fascist in office, there’s no reason the same laws they’re pushing at the state level couldn’t be pushed at federal level.
caine: They will try to push them at federal level, whether or not they get a fascist in and if they get a fascist in then it will behoove us to have these these systems in place.
WW: I guess, caveat: openly fascist instead of closeted fascists.
TFSR: Right. That makes a lot of sense. COVID produced the situation of isolation for so many people, that contributes to the ability to control us through the lack of access to our different kinds of needs. So that makes sense that that’s something that you have to overcome in this step by step way. I’ve seen that even in the response to Missouri and other states. I’ve been trying to connect people, there’s, “How do we know if we can trust anyone?” There’s a suspicion. So thanks for expanding on that.
But let’s dig in a little bit more to the peculiar aspects to this ruling. These are things that have been in the anti trans discourse, but it’s coming into the writing and the ruling in a particular way. So I want to hear what your thoughts are and how it’s been received, on social contagion, the screening of social media addiction, which we’ve talked a little bit about, and the other rulings about how trans people relate to each other, people on hormones, if you know people on hormones? If you could have thoughts or more information on this, I’d love to hear that.
WW: I mean, right off the bat, there’s something really chilling about hearing Fox News talking points, all of a sudden, coming over the whatever passes for law in this country. This like anti scientific, anti evidence based approach that these conservatives are pushing, it’s really difficult to argue and defend yourself against people who are choosing to flat earth your existence out of existence, essentially.
So social contagion, this whole idea that kids are going on TikTok and becoming trans because they see trans adults living lives and feeling fulfilled and happy, and the Conservatives see that as older folks grooming these young people into becoming trans or whatever. It’s a completely absurd notion and very reactionary thing. The really scary part is that when we were learning about the ways Planned Parenthood was looking at implementing these things, even though this is completely unscientific, they still have to be accountable for doing a screening on social media contagion. It doesn’t exist. It’s a fake thing.
So what we see happening is this nonprofit, that on one hand is spending a lot of money and trying to defend our rights and continue giving us care, they also end up being the arm of the State that implements these genocidal terms and tactics against us. Screening for social contagion, or screening for autism before giving people informed consent care.
caine: Which was so revolutionary when it happened.
WW: I don’t know, it’s it’s particularly alarming.
caine: So again, my background is a little more ‘history-y’, none of this shit is new. In addition to being a dog whistle, the idea of social contagion, particularly, the term started being used in 2016, ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria,’ but I saw it first in 2018 personally. There was a study that Littman produced out of Brown University that posited this in an official way. Since then, that term has been used in a lot of this legislation, and I think is fueling a lot of this particular line of inquest. Social contagion is used in that phrase. The thesis of that study is basically that…
It’s worth noting before I say that, that the study was performed on the parents of trans children who did not support them, and who were found on anti trans websites. These were primarily afab trans folks. The argument was basically that they were too engrossed in a fad, they didn’t know their own identity, and that this was just a way of coping with complex emotional conditions on the ground, basically. So they weren’t really trans, it was a fad. That is poisoning every thing that is happening now.
That’s also when you start seeing a bunch of articles come out using this idea in math. From there, within the year, both that study and the articles are being quoted in legislation that starting to target trans children. It’s been really depressing to been watching this for years, because I remember when that study came out in 2018. I see that it’s using the same terms and where they failed in 2018 they are starting to succeed. Everyday conversations are starting to have this specious idea in them that I have to argue with all the time now.
Before that, a lot of these ideas are coming from the 90s, in the early 2000s, and even earlier than that where they were primarily targeted towards the idea of gay people, generally. They revive old evil shit and they use it in new forms. I hope that was coherent. [laughs]
TFSR: Totally. So there’s a history to this, that finds itself into the texts of the law. You gesture towards this and we are talking about this in terms of the ruling itself, these are things that have been proven wrong, to whatever extent you can do that, scientifically or medically, these ideas of social contagion. I wonder if you have thoughts on why that doesn’t matter. I was thinking, also just listening to you before, about how so much of this is incoherent. Everyone in different places has different responses to it. The ruling itself leaves it up to individual doctors and service providers to determine how they’re going to do it. But also, whatever regular people being able to snitch on other people, there’s no consistent agreed upon consensus reality around any of this.
I don’t know if you have more thoughts on that, on the junk science or the incoherence of these ideas?
WW: The attempt to muddy the water is very intentional, because it’s so hard to combat that. If you’re both screening people for autism, which does exist and does show up in our community, and then simultaneously screening for something that doesn’t exist, social contagion, and all that data is collected, it doesn’t matter anymore, when two years go by and they can say like, “Oh, yeah, 40% of the people in Missouri have comorbidity of autism and social contagion that are trans. So here’s our evidence.” Even with the rat sheet, the report sheet that they had online, it got taken down because people flooded it with false responses, but then you also hear that the conservatives will just spin that to say, “Oh, well, we had so many responses to this. Look at how much the community’s concern with transness.” I think what happens when these fascists like muddy the water in this way is that then they’re able to pull out all of these bullshit straw men, and pretty soon, there’s so much misinformation, the erasure of the reality and the science starts to become more of a complete picture. It’s already happening where you’ll run into liberals, cis liberals and have conversations about transness and they’ll be like, “Okay, yeah, like this shit shouldn’t happen. But should trans women really be competing in sports?” Or like, “Is it that big of a deal if y’all can’t use the right bathroom? Like isn’t that just keeping people safe or whatever?” Even though the data is completely against it like, it becomes a more normalized position just from the proliferation of these mistruths and doublespeak.
caine: There are studies on bias that show that if you repeat an untruth long enough people will believe it. A lot of people do not have the time or energy or capacity, often legitimately, to do a lot of the fact checking we require, and when the lies that are being told about us tend to validate things that people want to believe, because I get the impression from the cis people I talked about that the initial time they confront the existence of trans people, it makes them feel uncomfortable about their genders. Which is a good experience for everyone to have, maybe, but people don’t like to be uncomfortable. So if you have someone else telling you, “Oh, that person is just mean,” there’s a lot of people that are going to just believe the one that’s easier. When you have two groups, and one of them is trying to argue with the truth, and one of them is happy to lie… the group with the harder burden is going to be the people telling you the truth, because it’s easier to lie and to lie in many directions.
That’s why none of this has to be coherent. It’s not trying to appeal to the part of people that thinks logically or knows things to be true. It’s trying to appeal to the part of people that feels and there’s nothing about feeling that is linear or logical.
WW: Yeah, we’re talking kind of about how this is affecting cis people, and people who don’t share our political understandings or whatever, but then inside of our own communities, unless we are radically stomping out misinformation, including when we hear these headlines, like I was saying, “Oh, our whole polycule has autism.” Unless we’re doing the work of sorting through all this information, and combating all of the misinformation, it doesn’t matter whether these laws even fucking pass, because people are fleeing the state already, and for good reason. This is happening now, who knows what the next thing is. It definitely feels like this escalation in Missouri is something that they’ll be able to repeat and has damaging effects on the larger trans community in terms of the misinformation and the baseline anxiety trans people in this country face.
caine: And morale, just among us, it’s a slog, you have to be constantly addressing it, you don’t get to rest, you’re exhausted, everyone around you is exhausted. It’s a lot. To shift the Overton window for cis people, and then for trans people it’s just like, “We only have to falter once, we have to be too tired to combat at once, and we lose so much ground.”
WW: Many of us are already struggling just to maintain housing, and work, and have the money to be able to pay for our medication. Having that need to be compounded by sifting through information. I dropped out of high school. That’s not within my wheelhouse. So what we’re having to do is come together and really be honest about what our capacities are. We’re all just whittled down to the bone. Just trying to get through the next day, trying to make sure we have a stock of meds for ourselves, that we all have escape plans, then beyond that, that we’re all fed, that we’re all getting to rest, that we have people to talk to, and be able to process this stuff with. The pace of it is so aggressive, that we find rest is evasive, being able to put down the social media and not look at what’s happening for a while. It never leaves your head. It’s just constant fear and anxiety.
caine: It’s hard to find time to be human.
TFSR: Right. Yeah, in a way it makes trans people have to be trans in a particular way all the time. The way that you’re describing it… I’ve been thinking about how these attacks in one way really narrow our focus in terms of our organizing and our movements to having to defend against these attacks. So there’s that. It means that we have to face against the State rather than carving up spaces for ourselves that are more able to flourish. But there’s other ways that just whittle us down. They steal our time away, our lives away by having to talk about it all the time.
WW: We already live in a world where the AG order went through, because we don’t have the choice to wait to see what happens.
caine: It’s such a bad sign that it wasn’t struck down, it’s just a restraining order, kick the can down the road another couple months. It’s hard to explain to anyone who’s not living through this right now how much this kind of limbo is terrible to experience.
WW: Totally, I was almost disappointed, honestly, when the restraining order went through, because it was just like, “Cool, we get to keep living in this anxiety, where we just don’t know what’s going to happen and we can’t really make plans for our futures.” We just have to live in this world where we’re ‘worst case scenario’ all the time kind of thing.
TFSR: Yeah. They have the time and they can wait us out too. That is something my friend has been talking about.
Since you brought it up a couple of times, can we talk a little bit about the decision to leave or stay? We had a discussion on The Final Straw recently, with people in Texas. They had a lot of thoughts on that. What are you seeing? How do people make this calculation about whether they should stay and continue to be trans in Missouri and organize or leave for your own safety?
WW: Yeah, I think this one very much comes down to an honest assessment of what our privileges are. It’s exactly what you’d expect to see. Liberal, white, affluent trans people. Fuck yeah, they’re all moving to the beach, right? And good for them. Then there’s all the in-betweens, of where you sit in terms of mobility, flexibility. I definitely support and we were doing what we can to help people have places to go for asylum. I don’t want to shit on that at all. I want my community to be safe, and whatever. But the other side of that is that this is a frontline and there are people who can’t leave. So in our organizing, it’s very important that our priority is those people.
The truth of it is, we don’t believe that you can outrun fascism. We don’t believe that going to the next state over is really a sustainable solution on a wider scale. Maybe as an individual, maybe temporarily. But for us, and I don’t want to speak for the other people in my group, but I do feel like the thought of, “Let’s just plan on seeing what we can do to make it work here,” and do some prefigurative thinking about, “Okay, things continue to get worse, what do we do to make sure we can continue having hormones for the next half a decade?” What would that look like? What would it look like if tomorrow we had to flee en-mass and it stopped being an option to stay. Would we be able to help the people who are more vulnerable than us get out of the state? What does that infrastructure look like? That’s my thoughts on it.
caine: I feel a lot the same. So I’m of the opinion that when some really big moral decision like this, you owe it some time to really wrestle with the implications of what you’re doing. I also think that, like we just said, this is a frontline and not everyone is the most useful here. So I think everyone needs to make this decision very seriously, themselves, but they need to make that decision with the awareness that every person who leaves is reducing the ability of organizing strength here. As the coalition here gets smaller and smaller and more desperate, that’s a real removal of power. If you do leave, then perhaps you can think of ways that you can support the community here that can’t leave because there’s a lot of people that that can’t leave.
For my purposes. I’m half out of the state already and I’m going to a place that’s not really that much safer. I’m going there because I have family. You can’t outrun this, so if I have to stop running, I’d like to do it around my family. But that’s a decision that all of us have to make and we should struggle with it. It shouldn’t be easy.
WW: Yeah. I also think that there’s two other points to me that stick out about this. One is questioning a reactionary impulse. I think that’s really important. They try and scare us, they try and make us afraid that our lives are unsustainable, or we won’t be able to continue existing here, they want us to leave. But perhaps the solution is to wait and to choose inaction and assess what are our options and what do we gain and lose by giving up this ground? I think there’s also just a part as an anarchist and a trans person, of just like, “Okay, shits going down here where I am, and this is a front line and we don’t just abandon people.” The state decides they’re gonna try and destroy lives and pass these laws that kill trans people, then we’re gonna stay and try and save lives. What is there in the next state that’s more important than that for those of us who can fight?
TFSR: Yeah, thank you, for all those thoughts. The US, because of the way that states pass laws that are different, it creates this weird uneven terrain where there’s these pockets of places that things are going down and pockets where it seems relatively safe and that makes it kind of confusing to think about more global organizing and where to put our efforts. So it’s important that you point out that there’s places where right now where we need to be on the defense, and places maybe where we can be building up other kinds of support and mutual aid that will come into connection as needed.
So I want to ask a little bit about what you’ve been seeing in terms of organizing. We’ve talked a little bit about Planned Parenthood, you can talk if there’s more nonprofits and bigger organizations, but I’m also interested in the kind of grassroots organizing or anarchists or mutual aid type stuff that you’ve been seeing as a response to this?
WW: Yeah. I can’t really speak too much to other people organizing on those fronts inside of the state. A large reason is the work we’re doing and the work a lot of those people are doing is not… we’re assuming that our medicine is going to be criminalized, and we’re not going to be able to get it. So it’s hush hush. But I can speak to what we have experienced for our own kind of immediate organizing. This situation has potential to be really gross if all of a sudden, certain states have banned hormones, this opens up potential for a lot of exploitation and a black market and a lot of harm to be caused. But that being said, at least in our circles, the reaction we’ve had from our greater trans community, which is friends and other states, it’s a culture of freely giving help. So we’ve had people sending us money and helping us build our pharmacy and have the resources to be able to help our community out of their own time, and out of their own kindness, and with no expectation, because there is this idea of solidarity amongst the majority of the trans folks that we personally, but I personally know, and the people we organize with here now. Shout out to friends in Salt Lake City who did a great fundraiser for us. We’ve got friends in Oakland, who’ve been helping us, friends nearby.
You mentioned earlier that it’s uneven terrain with different states and different laws. That’s also a point of strength for us. When we have friends in Illinois, and Wisconsin, and Minnesota and these other places that are within stone’s throw, or even Chicago. We have friends in Chicago who’ve been helping us out. Luckily, amongst the non monolithic trans community, there’s hackers, and chemists, and security people who are great at making sure we can organize safely, there’s a massive amount of skills and labor and care being offered.
One thing that’s made me feel really inspired and empowered in staying and in organizing is that the people around the around the so called the United States… we know the truth of it, we know that this is coming, they’re coming for all of us, so as we build to support Missouri right now, we’re talking about how we can show up and support our friends in Texas, and friends in Florida. It’s like triage. Where’s where’s the need? And how can we help each other as a greater trans community? I feel like we have a lot of power in that.
caine: It’s been really humbling, the amount of help that has come from out of state and from communities that we are connected to. Trans communities have always had this really beautiful culture and diversity of experience that you just don’t find in other kinds of community. Right now, that is a major strength. I mean, your first impulse was to bring us all together, almost literally, like within a few days you were bringing us all together in a much more organized way. Which is impressive as hell.
WW: It’s been nice. We make dinners, and we give each other shots, and we play card games, have a little reprieve.
TFSR: I think that’s so important to also talk about because as you were saying, this makes your life exhausting and painful in so many ways to be on the front line. But like that, we also find ways to come together and have joy and connection. Which is super important. Something that we don’t always talk about when we’re organizing in crisis is that we still have these social needs to meet. Thank you for talking about that. Do you have any thoughts on things that you’ve learned from the people who’ve been on the frontlines previously, or other kinds of things that you’ve been able to take from people who are not facing this kind of immediate danger? Any specific things that you’ve taken from these connections that you’ve been making?
WW: In a wider sense, this struggle is all one struggle, right. We are seeing the repression tactics being used in Georgia right now, for example. We don’t see our struggle as separated from that. We know trans people on that frontline, too. In Stop Cop City. I don’t know the best way to say this, I guess. But I feel like there’s a lot of lessons that have been learned in organizing, in general, in the last decade, from Standing Rock, to George Floyd, to Stop Cop City, we’re seeing all of these same kind of repression tactics from the State. A lot of the lessons that were learned in those other organizing spaces are super applicable. Also, a lot of the trans community that we are organizing with, in a greater sense, have been in the trenches already doing this other kind of work, which means they have experience with security protocols experience with dealing with these repression tactics of the state. So as we are reaching out and talking about all these things, it’s being informed by that larger struggle. I feel like we have a pretty extensive Toolkit, which is really cool.
Then specifically amongst the trans community, the proliferation in the last few years of people producing their own hormones has been massively helpful. Personally, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know how to read through laws and understand what they mean and I’m certainly not a chemist. But luckily, we have the friends that are, kind of thing, and there’s lots of those friends in surrounding states and across the so called the United States. So that information and that work that’s being done even in safe places enables us to have a lot of options and a lot of fluidity in how we approach surviving these conditions.
caine: The stuff that I always ask when I talk to people with more experience in these fields is, “How do you manage burnout? How do you manage not getting overwhelmed by the constant slog?” The stuff that’s perhaps more emotional or like more about staying whole through all of these processes, if that makes sense. In addition to the very pragmatic concerns that we have to deal with every day, there’s also the, “How do you manage the stress of all of this?” That that advice is very invaluable to me.
TFSR: That makes sense. I’m glad you were both highlighting the fact that trans people have been at the forefront, we could say, of a lot of the struggles over the last number of years. That’s also part of the connection. But I’m thinking too, as you bring up the making hormones, there’s also this kind of network for making abortion medication. I wondered if you’ve seen any kind of connection, practically, between the struggle to maintain access to care for trans people and the in the struggle to maintain access to abortion, or if you think that there’s possibilities there that could be really interesting or important to make connection with the abortion struggle by tying it to the trans struggle?
WW: This is a tricky one. For us, it was an obvious priority to have access to abortion medication for our trans community, specifically. That was relatively straightforward to figure out for us. I feel like a lot of the organizing we’ve been doing for our community is specifically being done within a community of trans people who are using hormones. So, although I think there’s a lot of possibility, although I see those struggles as being very intimately tied, they’re the same thing, ultimately, a struggle against patriarchy. It feels tricky to bridge the gap between organizers, who are and who aren’t centering trans people in abortion work. Trying to cross that bridge and show up in those spaces and educate, for us, seems beyond kind of our capacity in terms of trying to coalition build with a lot of cis organizers in that sphere.
But I do think that there’s a lot of possibility there, especially since we’re having to do the same kind of infrastructure building. We’re trying to have people who can drive people over state lines for appointments. I mean, they’re going to the same Planned Parenthood for the trans care they’re getting out of state as the abortion care, they’re getting out of state. So there’s no reason that we shouldn’t be sharing those resources. I think it’s just a matter of, again, doing that slow work of person to person reaching out and kind of like vetting the people we’re meeting before we tell them about what we’re doing, because we’re having to work in this gray area of legality. So I don’t know, that’s a tricky one.
caine: I suspect it’s probably highly regional and depends on the individuals involved. But in terms of the resources, information resources, legal resources, it’s very much the same stuff. If you think about like the way fascism functions, and the reason it targets gender, it’s targeting reproductive ability and the external expression of gender because it relies on subjugating most of the population according to a very rigid set of gender roles that it police’s viciously and so both of these things are manifestations of that violence, basically.
TFSR: Right. Yeah, that’s a good point. Also a lot of the discourse of the trans panic, it seems to me, when it focuses on youth is around the fear of losing the reproductive capability of the children. To reproduce the white race in some way.
caine: Yes, that struck me since the beginning with the ROGD studies. It’s such white replacement theory nakedly out in the open, and nobody was calling it, but like the entire thing was losing the reproductive ability of these kids to reproduce systems of power and literally.
TFSR: One other thought. I don’t know if this is something you have ideas about, but I’ve been thinking, the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade was like 50 years in the making. We saw over those decades that there was a kind of ineffective liberal lead attempt to defend abortion against this. Do you think that there’s lessons that we could we could learn about not replicating the same mistakes in the the attempt to get self determination and autonomy for trans people?
WW: I mean, for me, this is one I really stew on a lot. When we’re talking about how we allocate the mutual aid resources that we have, we have to think about that we want to support organizations, for example, in the two major cities, Kansas City and St. Louis, and we have to talk amongst ourselves like, “Okay, well, this group is doing this work inside of electoralism, but it could be really helpful if their efforts are successful, even though for us, we what we’re doing is making sure we’ll be okay, no matter what, creating our own safety and security, despite the state. We also recognize that without liberal institutions, that had the money to pony up to fight the AG law, for example, there wouldn’t have been a restraining order and it would have just gone through immediately. So, we’re kind of in a position where, both personally rejecting electoralism, and also being like, “Okay, well even if I can’t read the laws or don’t believe that they’re valid or respect the authority, they are dictating the ways that our lives are playing out right now in a very immediate and violent way.”
So yeah, as far as a lesson that’s learned from all of that, I think, not being afraid to coalition build with people who are working inside of those structures, while also prioritizing doing our work separately, and maybe not being super open with nonprofits and people who are working within electoralism about the gray area stuff that I think we need to do to stay safe right now. But also not just ‘poo poohing them, because on some level, they are ensuring at least that we have, in our paradigm, this extra couple of months to operate as things were before this shit moves to the next step.
caine: Insofar as it’s possible to have a healthy ecosystem for this kind of shit, which is already sort of a weird idea, then I think, probably there needs to be all of these different efforts happening simultaneously with the recognition that not everyone needs to be doing all of that work themselves. And that those of us who are at greater risk, in specific ways, need to focus on addressing the immediate risks to ourselves in our communities and the people who can’t access the help through more conventional means.
The kind of liberal organizing you were just outlining in the question, it had a lot of failures, obviously, and one of the biggest failures was that it did not and did not have the ability to reach communities it didn’t recognize. It barely recognized trans communities, which at that point, were named and known. It certainly can’t and didn’t see intersectional communities with disability concerns, it had very weak ability to address the concerns of poverty and the way institutional racism is affecting reproductive care.
In terms of learning from the failures of those organizing methods, I think we can definitely address that coalitional things we can definitely address the blind trust of appealing to the whim of Supreme Court justices will make huge amounts of difference. But in the struggle for abortion, like you said, Dobbs was 50 years in the making and the ability of trans people to be visible has changed dramatically in the past five years. So some of those mechanisms may not be applicable, basically, we are struggling to maintain the set of very shallow victories that have barely managed to happen, and to extend those victories. So it’s a different kind of mechanism we’re fighting with.
WW: I feel like the obvious lesson is that we need to be very aware of what kind of other organizing is happening, and specifically be aware of those blind spots they have and do everything we can to show up in those blind spots to keep each other safe. That’s a big thing about why it feels so important to be centering disability justice in this conversation. Because we’ve seen how it goes when you just ignore an entire group of the population.
TFSR: Yeah, these are really important points. Thank you for saying all that. Thinking to this more recent history of relative victories for trans access to care, you both mentioned a little bit about the medical aspect of these rules. And one thing that people have talked about in terms of the anti trans legislation and rulings that have been going on is how it re-medicalizes transness. We moved from the Benjamin rules of access to care, which required a bunch of hoops to jump through in order to be able to get access to hormones and surgery, to the informed consent model being more available for people, which puts the power more in the hands of the people who want the care rather than the doctors.
You’ve also mentioned the different reactions from people who aren’t taking hormones, which could be because they choose not to, or also because it’s so hard to access for so many people. So I just wonder if you had thoughts on the medicalization of transness in relationship to these rulings and how you are incorporating that in your response to it?
caine: I have many thoughts on this. The efforts to re-medicalize us are very much a first step. I will also say that some of this is meant to make people take actions themselves. So I have friends in states who are ostensibly as safe as can be. They have trans protection legislation and they’re telling me that they are choosing not to pursue hormones and care because they feel like it is not worth the risk for them right now. Or like they’ve been in the closet for X period of time and they feel like they can continue doing that with the damage that it does and that they admit that it’s been doing to them. I understand why one would make those decisions and how it’s going to be different from everyone.
I also think that some of this is to step back a lot of the internal community. Whether or not they realized that this is a dynamic, the internal community policing that exists in trans communities sometimes. I got to hormones very late because I identified as non binary initially, and it was not possible for me because my medical system did not use informed consent until I basically got to grad school. I only did so because I could stop and it changed my life in a dramatic way. Having access on that level, of being able to make that decision myself without having to worry about a bunch of cis people using my existence, if I chose not to continue, against my peers who needed it and who needed it more than me at the time. That’s how I framed it to myself, “I can survive without it, even though I know it will help me. I know it will do good for me, but I don’t need it enough that it would harm my peers who need it more than me.” It has changed my life for the better in every way. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to try it and one of the things I am personally livid about in all of this is that it is removing that possibility for people who might not otherwise have reached for this and that will be unseen by so many people.
WW: Yeah, for me personally, I couldn’t really separate my neuro-divergence and transness as being separate factors of difficult and tumultuous existence for a long time. I think I came to hormones as a final, “I’ve tried everything else, maybe this will help me feel less shitty” kind of thing. Luckily, I had a friend who was a prescribing OB GYN and try to and had a massive turnaround in my life because of that.
caine: Re-medicalizing it means that we’re going to go back under the scrutiny of cis doctors to see how we perform a very binary set of gender definitions that doesn’t suit anyone, I think and I deeply resent that.
WW: Yeah, I think this is an important thing we can distinguish about our response and understanding from a liberal response and understanding. What they’re wanting is assimilation, right? And what does that look like? That looks like people who perform binary gender roles as trans, and so our model little boys and girls don’t have to notice we exist. If we look like them, if we talk like them, then they will give us a seat at the table. We know about how much representative politics matters, right? So what we want is absolute bodily autonomy for everyone, without question.
So one exciting thing about operating in the space we have to now, as if our hormones were already banned, is that we don’t have to do fucking informed consent to each other, we don’t have to say, “Oh, you don’t have a dysphoria diagnosis? Then you don’t get to have hormones.” Fuck that. We will give hormones out like candy, anybody that wants to try it and if it helps, it helps. If not, nothing bad will come of it.
One thing about our work is we’re not fighting for anything short of the destruction of these gender binaries. So there is a radical potential in what happens when they start to try and close in on us, we can find ourselves in places of greater expansion.
TFSR: Yeah, thank you both for sharing your own experiences. What you said is really important, because there’s this internal policing that you’re talking about, because the larger world in the discourse is that trans people isn’t the wanted outcome for anyone, right? It’s like, there are trans people, it’s like unfortunate, they will be a minority. So there’s that discourse that makes it hard for people to transition, because you’re choosing to be in this kind of abject position. But there’s also this policing about not wanting to be on record as being trans, because I’m afraid of the State and how it’s going to start cracking down on us. Then also the gatekeeping, that happens within trans communities around who’s actually trans or not, which is really harmful to all kinds of trans people. One of the things that you’re saying, that I think is really important is going on hormones doesn’t have to be this earth shattering decision. Most trans people have kind of inconsistent access or history of hormones anyway. So we could explore our gender and go back to something else if we wanted or change multiple times in our lives. That’s not an image of transness that we ever really get. It’s just this one choice.
WW: Definitely. Yeah. I think the liberal transness that is sold to us as an oppressive force is absolutely repulsive. For me, I’m from out of state, I get State insurance and my care is covered, which for me, is estrogen and progesterone and blockers. But a lot of trans women get testosterone cream to help with sexual function, right? My insurance won’t cover both, because in the eyes of the Liberals that fought for my hard earned trans rights, the idea that I would be taking both testosterone and estrogen just doesn’t make sense, right?
So there’s this very direct sense that we should be able to do whatever the fuck we want, we shouldn’t see these things as like ‘Girl hormone, Boy hormone,’ it’s not like that. We know this in our community. The liberal notion that is being fought for of transness is very much still tied to these very colonial constructs. This is a great reason why we should not be centering settler white voices in conversations about gender.
caine: And also complete lack of medical information, because like a topical cream has radically different implications on how it’s absorbed by the body. Only the people taking it know that and their doctors specifically, which is very frustrating.
WW: Yeah, so much of what we know inside of our community about how hormones work and how they affect us, it’s all just based on our own experiences, most of our prescribing doctors don’t know anything, really.
caine: There’s no datasets. When I went for one of my surgeries, I asked my doctor what the outcome would be and she’s like, “I wish I could tell you but there is no information on your population. There’s like a couple of people I have treated personally but…”
TFSR: Thank you. The care is so inconsistent and it’s so hard to even trust providers often if they have no knowledge of what they’re helping you get. So, I just have a couple more questions, one practical and present based, can you share things that you’re working on and ways that people can show solidarity or support those projects?
WW: Yeah, so we are fundraising, and are gonna try and get a social media account stuff up for people to be able to reach out to us for funds. There’s some other local nonprofits that are doing grants and stuff and we’re just kind of watching to see what kind of means testing they do and if they’re prioritizing disabled folks and BIPOC folks or not. So we can make sure that we earmark our funds for the people who need them most. That’s one thing we’re doing.
In a bigger since, in our conversations with friends who have been willing to host solidarity actions for us in other states, also dialoguing with them about what they’re doing in their communities, and kind of encouraging them to experiment with communized pharmacy model, specifically. Basically, just getting together with their trans community. I think it can be a pretty daunting thing when we’re doing it in our paradigm in Missouri, it feels like life or death. But like, getting together with your friends and doing shots together is actually just trans bliss and a sacred ritual and a beautiful thing.
caine: It helps people with shot anxiety.
WW: So I think just encouraging trans community in a broader sense to be doing community care work. A lot of that is advocating that people start masking again and finding ways that we can be accountable to the disabled trans community. I don’t know when this will be airing, but we should be live on Instagram shortly as @MidMOTransFolks and we’ll have a way for people to donate if they want to, to our mutual aid thing.
TFSR: We can link and spread that information through our channels too.
So my last question, unless there’s anything I missed that you feel like we need to talk about, please bring that up, but I’m just wanting to know, from the position you’re in now, where do you see the struggle for trans liberation going? And if you have more thoughts on the divide between having to meet the State and sort of outside of institution work that we can do? Or like counter power projects, you know, or even just the direct more ideas of direct struggle? Where do you see us going from here on the more positive vision if you have that?
WW: I think I see a positive vision in what’s happening in terms of groups of trans people being willing to share freely the knowledge of hormones, and access, and access to material resources, even if it’s just money or sharing places to live, and resources for people seeking asylum. There’s a lot of power being built in that. I don’t think there’s a prescriptive way to be like, ‘this is how we fight fascism,’ and from our vantage the struggle for greater liberation has been something we think about all the time, we talk about all the time, but the reality of our situation is like, now it’s a struggle to just be able to stay here and be able to keep living. So maybe not the most positive message, but I think building a culture of resiliency, no matter what comes our way, making sure that the people in our communities all over the so called United States can continue having access to care. I think that’s like people manufacturing their own hormones, people taking it into their own hands, because I don’t really know what other front we have to fight on at the moment.
caine: I’ll do a bittersweet one. One of the things that has been hard to communities across state lines right now is that the idea that there’s a future feels like it is something for someone else. It is a luxury that I do not currently get to experience beyond maybe a couple of weeks or days. I suspect that’s going to be the condition of existing here for a while.
That said, I have a joke with one of my partners, that we desperately wish we could be boring. That we lived through our harrowing transition in our harrowing teen and early 20s and we would really like the ability to just be boring old guys now with some dogs and cats. I suppose the answer to what trans liberation might look like will be different for every single person in every single community, and possibly a marker of what that could mean is the space for it to be so, and for there to be as many or more ways to be trans as there are people in general. That’s where I would go with that.
TFSR: I love that. That’s maybe a good place to end. Unless you have any other thoughts or anything else you want to say to close us out?
Scott talked with members of Femboys Against Fascism, a group based in Liverpool countering anti-migrant protests. The local far right, along with Patriotic Alternative and other ghouls, have been trying to displace refugees being housed in hotels in and around Liverpool in the UK, using the usual fearmongering tactics about crime and danger. The Femboys have been at the forefront of making it known that migrants are welcome in Liverpool, an historically left wing city. In our discussion, we talk about different confrontations, the response of locals and the police, and the role trans people have played in facing off with the fash. Twitter: @FemAntifa
We shared this weeks ago on our patreon as an early release and in the near future we’ll be sharing this on the radio. If you want to get earlier access to chats like that or our chat with Shannon Clay, co-author of the recent history of Anti-Racist Action called We Go Where They Go, alongside many other thank-yous, check out patreon.com/TFSR and consider pledging $3 or more a month. The money goes to support our webhosting, printing and postal costs and, most of all, our monthly transcription work that helps get these interviews translated, printed as zines and sent in to prisoners.
TFSR: Hi there! Thanks for coming and talking to us. Can you introduce yourself with your name, any pronouns that you want to use, and any affiliation that you want to share with the listeners?
Puppy: I am Puppy, she/her.
Thigh-highs: I’m Thigh-highs, they/them.
P: We are representing Femboys Against Fascism, an anti-fascist, absurdist joke, starting up in Britain quite recently.
TFSR: That’s a great group name. I’m really happy to have you here. Before we get into the group itself, let’s start with the situation that’s kicked things off. Can you give us some background information about what’s been going on, particularly in Liverpool? What’s caused this conflict, and what’s at stake in it?
P: The government had been ramping up anti-refugee rhetoric in the month before, and they’ve been previously housing migrants and refugees in hotels and having specific deals with private hotels. Like the Suites Hotel in Knowsley, where a fascist riot happened on the 10th of February. They burned a cop car. I’m kind of jealous of them. There were about a hundred anti-fascists to counter 400 to 500 fascists, mostly older people. There was some weird gender stuff going on that night, where the anti-fascists asked the young men to go front, which sounded very… not what you’d want. From that riot, there’s been more anti-refugee backlash in the media. The politicians have had “Stop the Boats” on their plinth. There’s been a wave of fascist protests across the country outside hotels and a rising fascist movement.
T: And these hotels are often in racist areas. They’re not nice places to stay. They’re quite far from anywhere the people being housed in them would really want to be hanging out.
TFSR: Who’s deciding where the refugees get to have housing? Do you think they choose those, in particular, to put them in a place that will cause conflict?
P: Specific politicians have their own deals and relationships with small businesses and big businesses around the city. Mostly it’s just a governmental issue, Parliament and the MPs, but local councilors have played a role, mayors have played a role. Right now there’s a thing with one of the fascist leaders, because they owned hotels, and they wanted deals with the government, but the mayor worked with different small businesses and different hotels. All the politicians play a role. I don’t know the extent to which any individual ones do.
T: I think some of it’s just the government takes hotels, and it’s done by bureaucrats, and they don’t really care about where these people are being put. Some of the more rundown areas that have a lot of racism are the cheaper places.
TFSR: It’s just striking me that it’s a place that’s particularly going to cause conflict, huh?
P: Yeah, out in the boroughs, not near the center of the cities, out in rural areas that have also been quite deprived since the ‘80s and austerity in Britain.
T: Also, very white areas.
P: Very white areas. There’s been a reactionary backlash bubbling up for a long time. It’s definitely more intense than it has been in the past 20 years.
TFSR: Where are the refugees coming from?
P: Right now there’s a lot from Yemen…
T: Yemen, Syria…
P: Kurdistan.
TFSR: It’s not Ukrainian refugees, right? We’re talking about people fleeing conflict regions in the Middle East and those areas.
P: Yeah, the people targeted are definitely brown migrants. Ukrainians still get a fair bit. The far-right is also very pro-Russia and spray-paint “Z” about the place. So it’s gotten quite rough but definitely mostly darker-skinned people.
T: The government had a separate scheme for Ukrainian refugees. I think that scheme’s still got a lot of problems. But it was more trying to find spare rooms in people’s houses and strange “We’re all in this together” nationalism stuff.
TFSR: Also telling about how white supremacy comes out in how they treat the different migrants. But I wanted to go back to that initial riot you were talking about, the fash burned the cop car? And in that initial moment, what was the relationship between the police and the fascists? Because we often see that the police will be protecting fascists, rather than them having straight-up conflict.
P: It’s been kind of weird. The fash were definitely antagonistic towards the police that night. The police protected the anti-fascists. They were definitely doing their thing, trying to maintain respectability for the violence inflicted on the refugees. They didn’t want a pogrom happening. That’s bad for their image, and it was quite shameful. The fash were definitely antagonistic toward the cops. I think that might be something quite local. There’s a local antagonism towards the police in Merseyside.
T: Yeah, it has varying politics to it.
P: Whether you’re fash, or you’re left-wing, you hate the police if you’re in Liverpool, usually. It’s a different… But then again, the cops were really on the side of the fascists in most of the protests, constantly misgendering and harassing anti-fascists, arresting anti-fascists and not fascists.
T: It was probably more the fascist was so antagonistic towards cops, they shot fireworks and brought sledgehammers.
P: And they shot themselves.
T: It turned into more of a fight between the cops and the fascists, even though ideologically they’re not that far apart.
TFSR: That’s the three-way-fight analysis, too. Sometimes they side together but sometimes they don’t, and we have to fight both sides as anti-authoritarians. Is there a single group that’s behind the fascist demonstrations or different groups? And what’s the history with that, and who’s involved?
P: Mostly, it’s different social media explosions. Different groups have been vaguely associated with it. One is the People’s Resistance in Liverpool. They’ve been associated with Liberate Liverpool, the political party, and also the fascist protests. There are also North West Infidels, which are a racist drug gangs, and there’s Patriotic Alternative. They’ve been doing a lot of stuff around the country. Students Against Tyranny, they’re all part of similar networks, and they communicate with each other. It seems like a solid movement built out of different groups and people on social media. I don’t know who organized specifically the first Knowsley, but I know that Patriotic Alternative tried to capitalize on it. They claim to have leafleted houses in the area before.
TFSR: Patriotic Alternative is also a group that does a lot of anti-trans demonstrations too, right?
P: Yeah. They all do.
TFSR: So Liberate Liverpool, is that an actual party?
P: I don’t know if they’re registered as a political party. There was a thing about that.
T: I think they registered too late for a particular deadline, but I think they are now.
P: They’re a whole other beast to jump into.
Back onto the Knowsley stuff, what caused that? It would be a video spread on social media of a secondary schoolgirl being asked for a number by an older brown man. There’s no evidence of this having anything to do with the hotel. So it’s back to this thing of social media buzz that exploded as a thing, and local racists connected this incident to the Suites Hotel. It’s been a groundswell. You hear it from taxi drivers and from your local bigots. A lot of people right now are believing the fascists’ lies about refugees being dangerous.
T: Also, just the ground has been primed a lot for this sort of stuff. It’s in government messaging, and it’s in the newspapers. One of the current Prime Minister’s big things is “Stop the boats.” You’ll see newspaper headlines about refugees arriving on boats.
P: They call it an invasion in the fucking daily papers. There are concentration camps that they’re being sent to, and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.
T: Yeah, it’s fucked
TFSR: So it’s a general atmosphere that’s both the media, the mainstream politicians, this social media stuff, and then these fash groups like Patriotic Alternative coming in and stoking the flames or just pulling on the energy that comes when something that instance of the social media video. If there’s some actual response to that in the neighborhood, then all these other groups can take advantage of that to further this anti-immigrant, nationalist, fascist idea and energy.
T: Patriotic Alternative didn’t organize Knowsley. They previously tried to organize a protest outside the Suites a few days before and not got much traction. They’d also claimed to have leafleted. It’s unclear if they did. But their organizing on their own didn’t do this. Some of their people were at the riot, but in the footage I’ve seen, they’re not on the frontlines doing stuff.
TFSR: As far as I can tell from the stuff I’ve learned about Patriotic Alternative, they come in and take credit for things that they just show up for.
P: The fascist Socialist Workers Party.
TFSR: Sounds like Nazis. But they present themselves more clean-cut and stuff.
P: That’s a joke, sorry. The Socialist Workers Party do that on the left in Britain. [laughs]
TFSR: Right. Like the authoritarian communists do the same thing. [laughs]
We’ve got a little bit about what’s the general atmosphere of anti-migrant stuff that’s coming from everywhere and who’s showing up to these demonstrations, but what do you make of the people who are countering it? Is that organized? Is that also popular and people just are pulling in? Who’s part of the opposition to these fascist demonstrations?
P: It’s being varied. For the first one we organized, the first fascist one in Knowsley, it was 100 people turned up. That was all the left groups and the unions. Then they got bored.
T: And scared.
P: And scared. Yeah, they got scared. From that, after the first swell… I think this happened in Knowsley and in the Wirral. I don’t think we mentioned the one in the Wirral, but there was also a fascist protest outside of a hotel in the Wirral. A similar thing, Wirral Welcomes Refugees and Care 4 Calais and all that came out for the first one, and then it was less people by the next one. And the fascists didn’t turn up that night, so that was good. But I think mostly, it’s just been small groups of trans people. There were concussive protests in Knowsley after the first one, like every week on a Friday, and you’d have under ten trans people there for five hours. And on the other side of the street, there’s 50 to 70 local bigots, all revved up, shouting, “Send them back” and all that stuff.
I’m, frankly, really pissed off by the Liverpool left, They’ve come out when it’s been easy. They’ve come out in the city center, but they don’t treat it like these refugees’ lives are in danger. They’re getting more attacks on the streets. They treat it like it’s something that they can just keep to the city center. “We only have to really come out when the fascists come to the city center.” I’m just very pissed off at that. A lot of people have very fancy reasons to do nothing. I think that’s what you put it. I’m not gonna take credit for that. The fancy reasons to sell the newspaper, and that’s the most politically effective thing, and giving speeches outside empty buildings. “You don’t want to put young activists in danger“ and all these kinds of lines and excuses that people use to be like, “We’ll leave it on you, the most depressed people, on you refugees and trans people to defend yourselves.” This is my admonishment of the Liverpool left.
TFSR: So the main left is just sticking to more symbolic actions and not following out where all these protests are going into the different outskirts or rural areas.
P: Yeah, recently on Church Street, the main street of Liverpool, you’ve had the Socialist Workers Party, the Revolutionary Communist Group, Socialist Party, all on the same street. And then down the road, the racist party in the left-wing city of Liverpool, and none of them are doing anything about it. They’re all ignoring it being like “Well, it’s more important that we sell the newspaper here. That’s how we’re most politically effective.” They’re not going in front of the [right-wing] stalls. They’re not trying to counter it. They’re not counter-protesting it. It’s really shameful because it’s been left to a few activists to really put themselves at risk when they don’t have to, when we’re supposed to outnumber them anyway, when we do outnumber them, when there are twelve socialists on the street and four racists, and the four racists are just getting away with it.
TFSR: That’s interesting that you’re pointing out that the context of Liverpool politically is more of a left city and known for that, but this issue is not really bringing out people. I’d like to hear a little bit about why you think it’s trans people that are showing out? Is it because of previous organizations that the trans people in town have been doing? Or is it just because you find that there’s solidarity amongst the trans people with refugees in the city?
P: There’s a broad understanding a lot of trans people around the country are feeling, which is just “They’re coming for us,” that we’re facing the biggest scale back in our legal rights ever in history. There was a murder of a young trans woman in Warrington, a county neighbor here. I think every trans person in the area was like “Well, it could be me or people I love next.” We’ve come to a queer nihilist perspective with it. We’ll probably go down fighting.
T: Hopefully not.
P: Hopefully not, but I think a lot of trans people have that view now of “We want to go down with some fight.” That’s why it’s usually those people doing direct action.
T: I think it’s also we notice when bigots get a win or have successes. We notice it a lot in the streets because they’re a lot more confident harassing us and stuff. Those connections are more transparent to us as trans people.
TFSR: That makes sense. It emboldens them, and the fascists will attack refugees and trans people. We’re the targets for them, too.
I want to talk more about the anti-trans antagonism, but before we get there, can I ask, are connections with the refugees that you are forming? What other solidarity is being done besides countering the fascists? Is there any other work going on in the city or elsewhere to support the migrants?
P: Care 4 Calais have been supporting people in the hotel. I don’t really know the details of that. Different anti-fascist groups, I think. Merseyside Anti-Fascist Network, who we don’t get on very well with, they’ve been supporting some people in the hotel. And the counter-demonstrations outside hotels did prevent fascists from being near the entrance and being audible to the refugees. There has been a groundswell of support. It’s not nearly enough. Building community is a good thing in terms of supporting migrants, actually integration, not just vapid support from a megaphone or for bought gifts. I think our support, a big part of it, would be just realizing that there are people out to get them. I keep repeating myself. Counter-demonstration is probably the most successful way of supporting them as individuals.
T: But it’s definitely a hard situation to make more personal connections because the hotel is quite locked down. They’re very used to just having random bigots try to wander in and harass people. So it’s not really a situation where you want to just go approach people. You know how there are small moments in the street you get with people, where it’s sometimes not nice. It’s been those sorts of things more.
P: Just solidarity that you can feel in other people in your daily interactions with a bigoted world.
TFSR: Right, they’ll see the persistence of people supporting them, but I guess it also sounds like the conditions of housing them in a particular place that’s under threat and is isolated and separated makes it harder to form solidarity. I don’t know if these people are able to find jobs in town, or are they just relegated to the hotels most of the time?
T: Pretty much all of them can not find jobs because of how employment law is in the UK. If you apply for a proper job, you have to have the right to work in the UK, and that will get checked. If you’re seeking asylum, or you are a refugee, you often just won’t have that.
TFSR: Right, it’s just total isolation.
T: Yeah, the border regime in the UK is quite awful. It’s quite diffuse because if you want to rent a house, your landlord has to check you have the right to be in the UK and will check your passport. And similarly just having a job. So the border penetrates.
TFSR: Going back to your group, how did you all get together? Did your group start just particularly aiming at this confrontation? Or was there other work that you were doing previously that led to this?
P: Anti-fascists were already organizing small stuff as individuals between friends. Different people in different groups who were also fed up with how their groups have acted, some people who aren’t in political groups specifically. It’s just a few people who trust each other. It’s a joke. We’re quite firm on, “We’re not going to be a real group. We hate the real groups.” They’re pretentious, and they have these pretensions of grandiosity, and they end up being social cults. They restrict people’s social lives. They can lead to situations of abuse quite easily. Our way of doing this is, “We’re not a real group. We’re a joke.” And it exists as a piss-take of, “Those are the real groups.” You’ll see at demonstrations now the Trades Union Coalition, the Socialist Workers Party, Femboys Against Fascism, and the Revolutionary Communist Group, but I find that quite funny. We dislike the fascists’ claims to…
T: Yeah, it is a joke as well, but the concept of the “femboy” is quite fun. I really enjoy it as a non-binary person. It’s very annoying, this fascist claim to “femboys.” We want to disrupt that and take that back and be like “No. That’s our thing”.
P: Also, there are so many groups that have, especially in Liverpool, it’s “Class! Class! Class!” so we just thought “Tran!” We’ll throw that as our first thing. We’ve spoken to other groups in the city, and we’ve prodded them and shamed them into doing stuff. They’ve seen us do stuff, and they were like, “Oh, we can’t have them upstage us.” They’ve done a bit themselves. We’ve made friends as well. And also from the entire country, we’re hearing, “Why is Liverpool’s political situation so fucked up?” Our theory on that is people are comfortable, people are complicit.
You’ve got a good thing on this?
T: Before Femboys Against Fascism became a thing, we were hearing from a lot of people we know around the UK, “First Knowsley happened. What’s being done?”
P: “Leafleting!”
T: “We thought Liverpool was this left-wing place,” and this just seems to be rolling on here, and the effects are being felt all across the UK.
TFSR: It is funny to reclaim “femboys” because it’s so strange how that became a part of a fascist meme too. Can you talk a little bit also about– because you’re saying it’s an absurdist formation, does that show up in the ways that you go to these clashes? Is it the absurdity beyond just having the signs of Femboys around the more formal left organizations and the awful fascists?
P: We’ve decided to make posters. We’re gonna do some absurdist stuff. I’m not sure how much we want to tie ourselves to it right now. But we’ve been doing mostly just direct action. Because that’s what’s really been missing in Liverpool, direct action against this. What came about is. we’re the folk, and we’ve brought together the folk who were up for direct action, and that’s what we’re about.
T: In terms of dress, it’s really dependent on what we’re doing and when, because we have used black bloc and gray bloc tactics. Because we are a bunch of trans people, we do often have to be quite careful about fascists trying to dox us and stuff. But for some of the protests, we go with more of a fun look. These are usually the ones where we’re not gonna have to worry so much about negative things happening.
P: We’ve got a bunch of cis people to shroud ourselves in.
TFSR: Can we talk a little bit more about what the clashes have been like that you’ve seen? What the involvement of the police has been, if it’s changed over time? Because you said that, at first, it was a conflict between the fash and the police, but it’s changed towards the police harassing the anti-fascists. What repression have you faced, either from the police or from the fascists because of these different protests?
P: After the first Knowsley riot, there was a second one. On the second Knowsley, there was a car search of anti-fascists, illegally, for information gathering. They took pictures of everything they could. There was a non-binary person who was searched by cis-men illegally. That was because there was a bunch of riot cops in a van, and they massively outnumbered the anti-fascists. Constant transphobia in every interaction we’ve had with them, intentionally misgendering us. We’ve got so much of it recorded as well and just out there.
That was quite a tough night for a lot of people. The anti-fascists managed to hold out as long as the fascists and prevent them from assembling in front of the gate. But then, from the night after that, there was a fascist protest at Lime Street Station, which is right in the city center, and the anti-fascists massively outnumbered the fascists this time round. The police were forming a line protecting the fascists. And as they got chased off, and people started to disperse, the cops started picking up and arresting anti-fascists, brutally attacking one of the anti-fascists, and constantly misgendering, intentionally misgendering, and trying to pin stuff on the anti-fascists. One person got slapped with caution, but there were no charges. So it was an illegal arrest. That’s not a judgment of morality, of course. That’s just by the police’s own logic.
T: We think the police, when they were just arresting people afterwards, they were probably just trying to gather information, maybe intimidate as well.
P: Yeah, they tried to get into people’s phones. They didn’t manage to, but they were trying to get into people’s phones. Then, two days after that, the fascists organized to have a protest at St. George’s Steps, which is one of those big, empty buildings that people like to get protests at. [laughs] 20 to 30 anti-fascists gathered, and fascists kept coming in in small groups and getting told to fuck off. The cops kept an eye on that and hung about the area. From that there’s just been, every single demonstration we’ve attended, they’re trying to rile people up, trying to get people, just intentionally misgendering anti-fascists quite constantly, going right up to them and stepping on them and shit and forcing them back, saying some really weird shit.
T: With Knowsley, there were fascist protests. After the first one, there were basically ones almost every week. I think they were just trying to repeatedly call the same thing, get the same thing to happen. The anti-fascist crowd was smaller after the first Knowsley cause I think a lot of people were quite scared and shaken up by what happened.
P: I think by the end of it, it was just trans people.
T: Yeah. There were just countless Friday nights, where on one end of the road, you’ve got the fascists, trying to repeat an earlier success, and a small group of anti-fascists at the other end sticking it out. It was mostly just a battle of attrition, who could hold the space and who would keep coming out every week almost.
P: The anti-fascists outlasted them. I think that’s because the anti-fascists brought music and food, and [the racists] brought racist banners. And also their love is stronger than hate. I think that’s cool to mention. It was a demonstration of love, as well, as much as trying to drown out the fascists.
T: Yeah. I think you’re right, the fascists aren’t as good at preparing for protests. They don’t think about, “Oh, maybe my friend might need some water or might want a snack.”
P: First aid or…
T: Or bringing a first aid kit.
P: “What if the cops talk to us?”
T: They’re often not as prepared for holding a space for as long. Eventually, the fascist protests at Knowsley did stop. I think that was in large part due to that fact that they weren’t getting what they wanted to because of the anti-fascists, and their numbers were dwindling because of that. There were also a couple of fascist demonstrations in another area of Merseyside, the Wirral, that were less big and eventually petered out. Currently, there aren’t consistent fascist protests outside hotels in Merseyside.
Unfortunately, these kind of style of protest are still making their way across the UK. I think they’re getting largely beaten in other areas of the UK, but there have been a lot of them inspired by the first Knowsley one. I might be rambling, but the first Knowsley one was not the first kind of attempt at this sort of protest. Various figures had been trying this sort of thing for a while. Like Nigel Farage tried to get a similar thing going a couple of years ago, but it didn’t really take in the same way, and it didn’t really explode across the country in the same way.
TFSR: Can you talk a little bit more about how the struggle is showing up in the north, in Liverpool and that area, and how it connects to things going on in other parts of the UK? Since you’re saying it seemed to spread but the show-up is different in other places, which is counterintuitive because you said that Liverpool seems like a place that would be showing up more in force.
T: I think some of it is that Liverpool has this reputation. It makes a success here count more for the right-wingers because they can say, “Oh, they did it in Liverpool. We could probably do it here where it’s less left-wing.”
P: They’ve got placards saying, “We’re not far-right racists, just concerned parents.” So they’re trying to de-tie themselves from the openly fascist movements. Or at least not make it obvious.
T: I think there is also an element of, when right-wingers and fascists see something working, they’ll try and repeat it elsewhere. So you can get a rash of copycats. This even results in some silly things. Like following the Truckers’ Convoy in Canada, there were fascist groups in the UK trying to do their own truckers’ convoy, which just doesn’t work the same way in the UK and just went nowhere.
TFSR: The “concerned parent” thing sounds familiar because that’s the rhetoric that’s being used by the right here, specifically in anti-trans stuff, but also in terms of fighting anti-racist education. It’s interesting to hear that they’re invoking that too. That’s my other question. Since the UK is known for being a particular hotbed of anti-transness, if you wanted to talk more about how you see beyond just Liverpool, where it’s a trans group that’s showing up, but how you see connections between this migrant support struggle and support for trans people against the attacks by the right wing and the state itself.
P: The anti-fascist movement, in response to the fascist protests and the fascist groundswell, has been almost entirely trans people. Almost everyone who’s been on the direct actions, especially the more risky ones, and especially some of the longer ones—trans. That’s all across the country. North to South, Wales to Scotland, we’re all feeling it. There’s specifically a groundswell of trans anarchists, who are quite furious with the state of things. They have this understanding that Britain’s against them, and we’ve got to build our own communities and look out for each other and look out for people we can build community with. Trans people know that they’re the target right now. It’s all across the country. In any direct action anti-fascist group that’s not ran in a hierarchical way, where they end up doing nothing, it’s trans people throwing themselves in the front of it. Makes me proud. I’m already proud to be trans. But more.
T: Transphobia is also the norm for all the political parties in the UK. Both the main parties, Labour and Tories, use it and tolerate it within their ranks and will use transphobic rhetoric. There’s also subtler aspects that come out in the government messaging. When they talk about refugees, they often talk about the figure of the male refugee as this violent figure and use this idea of an essentialized male threat.
TFSR: So they’re using gender as part of the attempt to whip up violence against migrants with a typical appeal to fear from racialized men. I see that connection to the anti-trans stuff, too, because when they talk about trans women, they always are just saying, “These are actually scary men in disguise.”
T: Thanks, that’s precisely what I was trying to say. It’s this idea of essentialized maleness that’s placed upon people to say these people are bad and dangerous, and we should do bad things them.
P: There’s a problem in the movement. I think it’s worth mentioning that local political groups, especially in Liverpool, because of the history of the socialist city, the supposedly anarchist groups, the socialist groups have a massive transphobia problem. The leaders of the local socialist groups will casually misgender their trans members and then fake-apologize afterwards. The anarchists in the city…
T: Some of them…
P: Some of them… I’d say a lot of them have proven that they’re quite not willing to stand against transphobia. They’re quite happy to have trans folks come to their events and participate in their stuff. Again, for security, I won’t go more into that. But there’s a local massive problem in the political groups that are supposed to be pro-trans just completely ignoring trans people. We mentioned feeling more harassed in the street and getting attacked more.
T: Yeah, there are a fair amount of organized fascists in the UK. Tthere are not loads of them, but there are some, and they don’t all have the exact same ideology. You’ll see, occasionally, people from different fascist tendencies will still turn up to the same demonstrations because they all have transphobia and racism. They’ll still turn up at the things, but it is usually different groups organizing things. Not always. I think some of the anti-drag queen protests that have been called by particular fascist groups also usually call things around racism and trying to protest at hotels.
P: Yeah, if I could just go into the People’s Resistance and Students Against Tyranny. They’re two of the ones that have organizing a lot of stuff.
TFSR: The fascist groups, right?
P: Yeah, those are openly hard-right. I’m not sure how much they admit that they’re fascists, but the People’s Resistance, they’ve got a public Telegram, on that stuff you see just slur after slur after slur by all their members.
And Liberate Liverpool is closely tied with the People’s Resistance. I think it’s worth just having a rundown of who they are and what they’re about. They masquerade as anti-corruption. It’s a classic fascist strategy to be anti-corruption because every politician is corrupt. They can use that as a wedge. There’s a dissatisfaction with Labour because it’s Labour enacting the austerity and enacting the racism and the transphobia in Liverpool. Labour’s had power here for a very long time, so they’re feeding on people’s dissatisfaction with that. The leader is basically a local business owner who wanted deals with the mayor, but because the mayor dealt with other people, he started their own campaign.
It’s built around a lot of different groups. They’re basically quite tied to each other with the People’s Resistance and also a soup kitchen, which is quite scary because that community connection is what they’ve really been trying to build out. They said, “House the homeless.” And by that, they mean, “House the homeless, not refugees.”
They’ve been holding street stalls against what they call “15-minute cities.” You can explain this well, yeah?
T: Oh, it’s an entire thing. But the short version of it is it’s…
P: Anti-semitic…
T: Yeah, well most conspiracy theories, actually, when you dig into them. But 15-minute cities is one of the current right-wing things in the UK, because of some proposed changes Oxford City Council was making to how people can drive around Oxford to make it less congested. It’s quite boring, technocratic stuff, but it has some scary-sounding proposals in it, like increased use of license plate readers to divide the city into zones…
P: And what they’ve taken from that, I just want to mention … “show us your papers”, it’s fencing off communities.
T: Yeah, when it’s only really about congestion zones. Lots of cities do this sort of stuff but usually do with infrastructure, like making roads one-way, or turning them into dead ends, so that annoying people can’t just drive their cars through a small street. But because these people are very car-obsessed and identify it with their freedom, any move to make things a bit nicer for other people, like people cycling or walking, is seen as an affront for them.
Admittedly, the Oxford proposal is a bit weird because it entails way more license plate readers and keeping counts of how many times people have been in certain areas and charging them if they’ve done particular journeys too many. So there’s changing infrastructure, which is a way more sensible thing to do. There have been weird protests in Oxford about this by right-wing conspiracy groups. It’s become the new go-to thing that they’re trying out, even if it isn’t really that interesting. So they have to make it interesting by adding on a bunch of conspiracies about how the government is going to track everywhere you are and find you if you move outside your neighborhood. And usually just admit it’s about tracking where cars go.
P: Quickly on to Liberate Liverpool. They’ve been including on their street stall ex-EDL [English Defense League] members, known fascists. They try and keep their chants subtle, to anti-corruption and just “Liberate Liverpool.” But they’re trying to have a pastiche of not being a fascist group. They’ve been running in local council elections. One of the people had to resign from running from that because anti-fascists went into social media and dug up them using excessive slurs and talking about the need to wipe out sexual degenerates.
There’s a lot of stuff in their social media, in their networking, that’s very tied to American conspiracism. You see a lot of stuff that’s QAnon stuff. It’s really penetrated. That’s just some stuff I thought worth mentioning about them. Also, they’re trying to do a postering game. They seem to have money behind them. They seem to have small business money behind them, a bunch of different local small businesses, because they’ve got a lot of materials, and they’ve been having people put up their posters professionally, before they get ripped down, of course.
TFSR: It’s interesting, too, that the Liberate Liverpool name is confusing because that sounds like a good thing, to liberate Liverpool, but what they’re talking about is specifically for white Liverpool citizens, and they’re actually also talking about something more restrictive than anything else. I can see how that would be confusing to recruit people who are living in such hard means because I know even just with the winter and the oil shortage and everything, things have been difficult and getting worse for everyone in the UK and everywhere, obviously, too.
Continuing on this line, I’m interested in what you think is the relationship between the struggle on the street and the political struggle. How is it playing out in the political realm?
T: I think the Liberate Liverpool stuff is opportunistic for a few things. They saw what happened in Knowsley and thought Liverpool is a bit more ready for a fascist political party. There was a big corruption scandal with the Liverpool council, enough that the mayor had to step down…
P: Joe Anderson left and then Joe Anderson took over.
T: Yeah, it’s quite funny. The Labour mayor was called Joe Anderson. He had stepped down and got replaced with a new Labour mayor, also called Joe Anderson. So they’re really selling us on things changing there.
P: It’s not hard to run against the Labour Party. That’s the sad thing really. People don’t feel like they have options politically. I feel like a lot of people are going to vote for the fascists out of spite to Labour this time around, maybe not even really going into it about what they’re about.
T: I kinda disagree. I’m just gonna say it. I don’t think they’ll get in. I think they have a few chances to maybe get a councilor or two. There are council elections coming up on the 4th of May. There are some changes to Liverpool council in that the wards have been redrawn. There are less established candidates for places.
But the way these things usually go is nobody knows who any of the councilors are that much. You walk in and be like “Ooh, I’m a Labour voter,” or “I’m a Green voter,” and then you tick next to those people, and you don’t really think about it too much. Independents didn’t get in the last time there were council elections. Maybe the right-Liverpool could get a Councillor, but I’m not too worried about it. I feel like we’re on different sides of this.
P: Oh, very different. My opinion of it is there’s not been a fascist movement like this in Britain for a very long time. There’s so little resistance right now that I think they could take a few council seats. They’re running the People’s Resistance. They’re trying to worm their way in as much as they possibly can into, even if it’s not the local council, it will be school boards, all that kind of stuff, trying to get into positions of authority and positions of power.
TFSR: Yeah, there’s a similar tactic happening here. My last question is what kind of support do you need from people who are not in the area? And do you see things going for your struggle in the coming months? And then also places to fight to connect and find you all.
T: I think there is stuff that people in other cities can take and learn from our experiences. Liverpool has this mythos and reputation about being a left-wing city. I think that’s actually been quite toxic for it, or for people in Liverpool taking things more seriously and organizing to actually counter rising fascism and hate, because you’ll hear people talk about how “Liverpool’s a left-wing city, it’s a socialist city”, last time. And before Knowsley, there was a lot of talk about a time when fascists tried to march in Liverpool and they got ran out, met by a big crowd.
P: The legendary day of 2015, when we, the Liverpool people, the brave Scousers, defeated the fascists. Mythologized.
T: Yeah, people don’t talk about that so much now because it was used to pretend that more would happen, or people rested on this mythology, instead of doing effective things. Knowsley probably wasn’t the first time that showed that this mythology isn’t really what it’s chalked up to be. When there was a Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, there was a TERF meeting in the Liverpool, and if you believe the mythology, that would get strongly opposed by big crowds, and it wasn’t. It was small crowds. People did stuff, they tried to shut down the meeting but it wasn’t thousands of people. It was very small groups.
P: Yeah, and this is an appeal from both of us to anyone. Please do what you can to prevent fascists from assembling. Please don’t be complacent in a city’s reputation. Please engage in direct action to protect our neighbors and our friends and just other people. The big result of all this is a lot more bigots are feeling a lot more emboldened just for street harassment recently. It feels like things are just getting worse. But we can fight back, and we can bash back.
If you’re local to Liverpool, you don’t need to get in touch with us. That’s not what we would recommend. You can, and we’ll happily do stuff with you. But you can do stuff yourself with your friends and form your own little groups of people you trust and do direct actions. Don’t believe in the leaders of these socialist groups and these other groups being like “We need to sit around and do nothing.” Believe in what you think is right. That.
TFSR: Is there a place to find you to keep up with what’s going on?
P: We are on Twitter! Femboys Against Fascism! The @ is @FemAntifa.
TFSR: Great, so people can see what’s going on there. Is there anything else you’d to share before we end our conversation?
T: I think this is like most places, I wish there’d be more protests that weren’t just shouting at empty buildings. Don’t get poured into these… There are a lot of alts and not nice groups that will try and redirect your energy. You just serve them or sell their newspaper.
P: “Preserve the group. We can’t do this thing. We gotta keep the group going.”
T: Like brand-building exercises. Try to get caught up in that.
P: Fuckin hell, the brand-building exercises… Ooof…
TFSR: There’s a lot of frustration too in just repeating the pointless march or whatever.
But I think it’s important what you’re all saying about showing up against the fascists because that’s not just a symbolic chanting at an empty building but showing up where people are trying to do harm and countering it. And also just showing them that they can’t just take to the streets and be unopposed.
Well, thank you so much for talking and sharing what’s going on. As things come up, I want to get update. I’m sending solidarity to all the Femboys in Liverpool who are holding it down against the fascists despite a general laziness about doing that in the so-called socialist city.
P: Thank you so much. We love you. We’ll stay in contact. We’ll keep you in the loop.
