DFW Support Committee, A Better World Bookfair + Save The UNCA Woods

montage of a flyer for A Better World Book Fair with line drawings of simple items and a circle A, alongside a picture of a mockingbird on a mesquite branch in front of a blue sky, a graphic for Save The Woods featuring a number of animals — Download This Episode

This week on the podcast, we’re featuring three segments. First up, A member of DFW Support Committee, then organizers of the A Better World Bookfair in Waynesboro, VA and finally, organizers working to save the UNCA woods

DFW Support Committee

First up, you’ll hear a member of the DFW Support Committee supporting the defendants arrested on and around July 4^th in relation to a solidarity noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, in which a local police officer was injured. We speak about the case, the expanding web of repression against leftists in the area, what’s at stake in the case and how to support the 11 defendants.

You can reach them at dfwsupportcommittee@hacari.com and you can donate at https://www.givesendgo.com/supportdfwprotestors and here’s a zine of info put out thus far by DFW Support Committee [00:01:40 – 00:35:19]

MAILING INSTRUCTIONS

Guidelines for writing (important!)
All mail is monitored by state and federal law enforcement. Be extremely mindful of what you are writing. Do not under any circumstance discuss the facts of the case, and do not include overtly political commentary. Consider writing about fun things you’ve done, telling stories, or sending poetry!
All addresses must be formatted as follows and should include a return address if possible.
Full name
Johnson County Detention Center 1800 Ridgemar Drive
Cleburne, TX 76031

NAMES AND BOOKING NUMBERS

Savanna Batten 202502020
Ines Soto 202502008
Elizabeth Soto 202502014
Seth Sikes 202502010
Maricela Rueda 202502018
Meagan Morris 202502011
Joy Gibson 202502016
Nathan Baumann 202502009
Autumn Hill 202502023
Zachary Evetts 202502013
Daniel Sanchez Estrada 202502039

A Better World Book Fair

Next, you’ll hear Beet and Mad Dog, two anarchists organizing the upcoming A Better World Bookfair in Waynesboro, VA on Saturday, July 26^th. We talk about the bookfair and taking space in rural locales as leftists and strengthening our bonds amidst the rise of the right under Trump 2.0. [00:35:56 – 01:02:11]

Save The UNCA Woods

Then, you’ll hear Callie and Heather of Friends of the Woods talking about their campaign to save the UNCA woods, 45 acres in Asheville’s Five Points neighborhood from destruction by the university in a scheme to build a 5,000 seat soccer stadium, market rate housing and retail spaces. You can learn more at www.SaveUNCAWoods.org. [ 01:02:58 – 01:42:44 ]

Finally, Sean Swain speaks about the ODRC’s war on art… his art… [ 01:42:44 – 01:51:10 ]

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Featured Track:

Mercy, Mercy, Mercy by Cannonball Adderly from The Best of Cannonball Adderly The Capitol Years

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DFW Support Committee Transcription

DFWSC: I am a member of DFW Support Committee, and my pronouns are they/them.

TFSR: And what is the DFW Support Committee?

DFWSC: DFW Support Committee is a group of people’s loved ones, comrades, friends, family members, who are supporting the 11 people who were arrested in connection with the Prairieland Detention Center activity. Σome of us have legal support experience and anti-repression experience but our main goal is to get our loved ones out, to get them free.

TFSR: So it’s pretty ad hoc, it was created for the purpose of…

DFWSC: Yes. Yeah, it’s totally ad hoc, it was created out of the arrests happening. The thing about DFW is that DFW has sort of an up and down cycle of things happening, but in general, I think it doesn’t have the sort of long-term developed movement infrastructure that a lot of other places around the country have.

Part of what we’re thinking about here with this as well is like, “how do we ensure as things move forward that there is more sort of standing infrastructure to support people around legal support and anti-repression?” Because, you know, I think this is not the last time this kind of thing is going to happen here in particular.

TFSR: And DFW, again, is the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, which is a pretty conservative state, right? As far as the governing politics go, it’s a kind of reactionary part of the country, you could say?

DFWSC: Texas is extremely conservative. What we joke about here is that Texas is trying to out-fascist the Trump administration at this point.

DFW, as a metroplex, has over 8 million people in it, so it’s actually huge, it takes a long time to drive from place to place. In terms of how things work, Dallas itself as a city is actually a fairly progressive city in the context of Texas, there’s a lot of sort of democratically elected officials.

Dallas is an extremely multinational city, it has an incredible amount of immigrants from all over the world, an incredible amount of people speaking different languages, cultural enclaves for different ethnicities. It has historically had a large population of folks that are Black and a large population of folks that are Latino, specifically Mexican. And then you have Fort Worth, which is the sister city, which is sort of less diverse and more conservative. There is still a very large population of Latino folks in Fort Worth and a smaller population of Black folks that live in Fort Worth as well.

One of the things economically to understand about Dallas and Dallas-Fort Worth: Dallas is sort of the secret center of capitalism in the United States. It’s got the defense industry, it’s got a ton of manufacturing, it is like the center of logistical supplies in the South. A lot of trains and different things go through Dallas. There’s like extremely, extremely, extremely wealthy people that live in the city. There’s like $30 million plus homes regularly sell in the city of Dallas. This is a place where a lot of the ruling class of capitalism is actually living and intentionally not interested in having people oppose them and challenge them.

Fort Worth is a little bit less the center of capital in the same way, but because it’s very close in proximity, it has a lot of the same sort of impact and Dallas does in terms of like ruling elite and global capital. The difference really is that Dallas elite want to think that they’re New Yorkers, but they live in the South and Fort Worth elite are really interested in being cowboys. The stockyards are there, there’s a rodeo there, there’s a lot more sort of stereotypical Texas traditional infrastructure that exists in Fort Worth. The other way that this matters is that like there is a split in terms of counties.

Dallas County has the city of Dallas and then Tarrant County has the city of Fort Worth. Tarrant County is notoriously corrupt and one of the worst places to get arrested in the state of Texas. Then where everybody is right now is in Johnson County, which is south of that, and is even worse. This area of Texas has one of the most conservative federal courts. When we’re thinking about like the people who were trying to say that the FDA authorization of mifepristone should be revoked, those are the sorts of people that are judges and in the judicial system, especially in like Tarrant County area.. People really combine Dallas and Fort Worth because literally if you were to drive from Dallas to Fort Worth, you would never realize that you had changed cities, honestly, because there’s complete development between the two. But in terms of sort of the political context, they’re different.

In terms of the left, people on the left here really act together in terms of Dallas, Fort Worth, right? Because the left here is so small, people will go to things in Dallas and Fort Worth and people in Dallas will go to things in Fort Worth. We go back and forth and see ourselves as like one larger community. That’s sort of the political context of where we are at in Texas.

In terms of Texas…Texas right now is passing extremely reactionary bills. We just had a bill that’s going to take all GSA’s (or Gay Straight Alliances), any sort of support for queer students out of all schools. The state is doing a bail reform bill that’s going to make it even harder for people to bond out. We already have a pretty difficult system for people to use to get out of jail, even pre-trial, so even before one is indicted, you have to bond yourself out. You have to go to a bail bondsman usually and that system is very difficult and it’s going to get more difficult now because of these bills that are passing.

We are in the authoritarian fascist playground where I think a lot of things are being tried out here in order to be sort of pushed into other parts of the country because our state legislature and our governor and lieutenant governor and attorney general are incredibly far right, some of them identify as white Christian nationalists. They are funded by some billionaires who are oil people who are also white Christian nationalists. That comes out to play in the fall, when we will have the 10 Commandments posted in all of our public school buildings. So stuff like that is happening here. I think that’s a really interesting context for people to think about as, as moving things. Trump is looking at places like Texas and Florida as places to try things out to then move into other states.

I also think that it’s important a little bit for me to just talk about anti-deportation, detention centers since this sort of case revolves around that. One of the things that’s interesting is that there’s a lot more infrastructure here for the police to act as immigration officials than there are in other states, right? A lot of states, blue states in particular, have sanctuary cities have fought to ensure that the police supposedly have some sort of distance from immigration enforcement, whether that’s what actually happens I think this is a really great question. But legally, in lot of places that are more progressive, I think there’s supposed to be this sort of distance between the police and immigration.

Texas actually has a law on the books that is being held up in court right now that police are, will become immigration agents and that they will have the right to ask about your immigration status and basically detain you based on immigration status. Police right now are not supposed to do that. That has already been challenged, but the thing about Texas sheriffs and police, like other places, is that they do what they want. Our understanding is a lot of where deportation is happening on the ground in Texas is actually through interactions between people and the police, police pulling people over for a broken taillight, seeing that they have a Latino last name, and then taking them into the county jail and then the county jail, doing some investigation and putting them on an ice hold. So there’s sort of less spectacular raids, like we’re seeing in blue cities, where law enforcement is going to people’s works and stuff like that. Some of that is happening here for sure. A lot of the ways that deportation infrastructure is interfacing with folks in Texas is through police interactions and then border checks. The border patrol is setting up checkpoints on the road, or police are setting up checkpoints on the road and then they are using that as a pretext to just take people if they think they may be an immigrant of any kind.

We are also seeing here people being taken at court. I think that’s a universal thing that’s happening across the United States. But that context makes things a little bit different here in terms of challenging the kidnappings and renditions that are happening. The other piece of this that’s important is like some of the main detention centers that people are being flown out of to go to like CECOT, and some of the other places, are here in Texas. The State of Texas has bought a tremendous amount of land and offered to either build sort of open-air detention camps or infrastructure for the U.S. government to detain migrants and undocumented people and really, I think anyone that they’re wanting to detain. Texas is very hot, so there are a lot of problems with the creation of sort of like open-air camps in a state where it regularly reaches 100 degrees Fahrenheit for several months.

The Texas state government is also very invested in supporting the deportation process, the detaining of people. For people in Texas this has become a huge daily challenge and it’s been asked of people here different ways to challenge that then maybe you have in a place where, you know, the Trump administration has decided to make this a spectacle. So that’s the context that we have in DFW and in Texas that are really thinking about in terms of how are we stopping people’s kidnappings. Because let’s be honest, these are kidnappings. You know, they’re renditions. I don’t know if anyone was around under George W. Bush’s time, where like people were just secreted away to a foreign country where people couldn’t find them and were tortured by the US government? Back then it was people outside the US being shuffled around, now we’re seeing people from here being taken out of the country. Like people being sent to South Sudan, people being sent to El Salvador, really, really similar vibe and even more intense. You know, these are the kinds of things that authoritarian governments historically have done and ramped up, even in modern times. And then that’s what we’re seeing right now.

That’s why I think people continually feel that it is extremely important to challenge this happening. Because we are in a moment, we’re at the beginning, if we think about historically how authoritarian fascism rolls out, we’re at the beginning of it in terms of a change in how it looks in the United States. The United States government has always been authoritarian, but it’s been sort of liberal, neoliberal, a different version of it. With the Trump administration coming in, we do have a change in context and if we’re looking at how these things happen historically, it is so important in this time that we are challenging, resisting, rebelling against this regime and its implementation of its authoritarianism.

Because if it is not challenged, it’s just going to push further and further, right? I mean, I think there’s a real question around people who are here and have gained citizenship through the naturalization process around whether they will be able to maintain that citizenship. I think there’s a real question around, like, realistically, with the Supreme Court ruling that just happened, in states like Texas, where we were not a part of challenging the executive order, when the days, when the amount of time lapses, Texas will be able to challenge people’s birthright citizenship in the state. Because we were not a part of that lawsuit, unless someone in Texas becomes a part of that class, and there’s a ruling that then halts it in Texas.

Citizenship is a really limited concept, I think there’s a lot of problems with the framing of citizenship, and I think it’s a context that a lot of people in the United States understand, and right now it is a way to invoke a certain set of potential rights that people might have.

TFSR: A friend of mine was just talking to me about this and sort of framed the defense of the 14th amendment and the right of someone born in the country to be a citizen as a byproduct of the end of the civil war and the end of chattel slavery in the US. This administration’s and the Heritage Foundation and whoever else’s approach towards attempting to undermine that is a clear echo back to bringing the US to where it was before 1865 (or parts of the country at least). Law enforcement in Texas is very much still in the heritage of being a territory that was formed in order for white people to own Black people. That’s why the whole war with Mexico happened, to carve out more territory and the like. They’re acting as slave catchers is what they’re doing.

Texas has been at the forefront, alongside of the national conservative news outlets like Fox and parts of the republican party and pushing a narrative of invasion from the south, pushing back on like different states that offer sanctuary or areas that offer sanctuary through its governor and Senator Cruz for years now. This is literally what the Trump administration is arguing that he needs to run national guards or military domestically in the country because we’re facing this “invasion”. It’s very VDare and scary.

Finally I wanted to say with the outdoor containment of people or encampment of people, that we had a guest on who was going through the deportation process and being shuffled from facility to facility before being kicked back to Chile. Angel was on a couple of months ago and they were talking about they were at Prairieland. They were talking specifically about how water was being argued as being a privilege to people that were incarcerated there. There was a lack of Spanish language let alone Mandarin, Creole or other languages that people would have been speaking in there so that people could advocate for themselves with the guards and the administration. But, yeah it’s a hellscape and those are indoor facilities

DFWSC: Yeah, and so imagine believing that water is a privilege in a place that’s 100 degrees with no air conditioning and probably no shade. Like, people will just die. You know? People will just die. I think that’s part of the point, right? I think this is very much a way of creating huge amounts of fear and I want to use the word ‘terror’ in communities, so that people don’t resist and people just accept what’s happening to them. I think it’s so important that you go back and bring up the context of enslavement in the United States and the role that Texas played, right?

I think it’s so important that you go back and bring up the context of enslavement in the US and the role that Texas played. I think a lot of this is about “purifying the United States” and getting back to the United States as a white, settler country. Especially in a state like Texas where the history of Anglo white settlement is so central to peoples mentality here… The role that the Texas Rangers had as its own armed paramilitary, they had a huge hand in massacres of Native and Mexican people in Texas. They acted as slave catchers, because one of the things that was happening is that slaves were escaping from Texas owners and going across the border to Mexico where slavery was no longer allowed, which is also a context of part of that war that happened. We have to really understand that context, too. That it’s not just about, like, getting rid of undocumented criminals, it’s really about purifying the United States so that it goes back to being their vision of this sort of white settler state, right?

You know, there’s only certain kind of people that fit in that vision. And most of us probably listening to this podcast will not fit into that vision if you fit into any set of the identities. I mean, the other thing I would just say as a side note is that a lot of anti-LGBTQ and especially anti-trans stuff has been passed here. The conditions in Prairieland right now are horrible. The conditions in Johnson County Jail also are horrible. What our defendants are experiencing in the jail is pretty horrifying. We have some defendants who are trans and guards are refusing to use their names, even if they legally change them. They are being housed in the part of the jail that does not meet who they actually are, which has created a lot of danger for people. I think those relationships, those issues are really interconnected there in terms of what’s happening.

TFSR: Thank you for that context. I wonder if yeah you would tell us a bit about what happened on July 4th 2025 outside of the Prairieland detention facility?

DFWSC: Absolutely. So I want to just preface this by saying that we have the state’s narrative of what happened and we have our personal sense of what may have led up to what occurred. But in terms of what happened on the ground, nobody knows, really, at this point. We are just wanting to ensure that people have their best chance at a defense case. So, we’re only going to talk to what is really in the public information for that reason.

It seems that a noise demonstration was called at the Prairieland Detention Center because this is one of the places where folks are being held in horrible conditions. A noise demo, in case folks don’t know, is just an event outside a jail or something like that where you make a bunch of noise to show your support for people inside. This is something people do regularly. My estimation is that people really wanted to let people inside know that people on the outside are fighting for them. And, you know, it was the Fourth of July. So the thing to think about with the context of Texas and the Fourth of July is everyone is setting up fireworks everywhere. Everyone is shooting guns into the air. There’s all these stories on July 5th in Texas of “my neighbor’s roof had bullets lodged in it from random people shooting up in the air.” I kid you not.

Texas basically has no gun regulation as a state. There’s very little in the way of getting a gun. Open carry is 100% a thing here. Lots of people own and use guns of all varieties in the state, whether they’re on the left, right, or don’t identify in either of those ways. Having guns is a cultural piece in Texas. Now, we could talk about that at a different time, like, “why that is and how that relates to settlerism” and whatever, but that’s just a cultural touchstone in Texas. People here, no matter their political affiliation, will open carry and all sorts of things.

We had a big fight with the attorney general because the State Fair of Texas decided last year to not allow people to bring their guns. The attorney general of Texas has been fighting this, and now the state legislature has taken up a bill to say that the state fair has to allow people to have their guns at the state fair.

TFSR: Really important fights there.

DFWSC: Yeah, and the State Fair was, like, “yo, all these people have been shot here, and it’s making people not want to come to the State Fair. Anyways…I think that that piece matters, that people are armed here, that is not an unusual thing. I think if you are in a state that that is not a part of the culture, you’re going to hear this narrative and be like, “oh, my God!” And for us in Texas, we’re, like, “Of course!” Everybody’s driving around with guns in this state, literally, everybody has a gun in their car. This is why road rage is really intense here. I think that context is important.

The state of Texas is using some of the cultural elements like that to frame this as this nefarious urban cell of super Antifa soldiers who are doing all this stuff. The state claims there was a noise demo, some police came out to interrupt it, an Alvarado police officer and some ICE guards. They came out to interrupt the action, and something happened, right? The local police officer was injured in the neck and then hours later was released from the hospital. The state says he was shot, but it’s important to note he was only in the hospital for a few hours. It’s not clear who shot, and it’s not clear how that went down. Honestly I take everything the state says with a huge grain of salt. All we have in a charge, which is not fact. The state has this narrative that it was an ambush.

We are challenging that narrative in part because the Trump administration lies, right? They lie, they make up facts. The police have also done this for a long time, this is not a new thing for the police to do as well. People have told us that the Johnson County police are a pretty crooked set of police. If you have a scary stereotype of what you think a small-town Texas sheriff is like, that should be in your mind when you think about Johnson County. We don’t believe that whatever narrative the state is putting forward is accurate in terms of what happened. We have a lot of questions, as do lawyers we’ve talked to, about what actually happened that night.

What else would I say? I mean, again, people have a “constitutional right to bear arms,” you know. They’ve made all this big deal about people having weapons and the reality is that in Texas, your constitutional right to have weapons is protected over anything else. The other thing I would just say about this is that something happened, and everyone present was arrested, as far as we’re aware. That opens the possibility that there are people that were arrested sitting in jail on very severe charges that really were maybe even not present for any of the things that happened. So, everyone present and arrested were charged with terrorism and aggravated assault on a peace officer with either a firearm or a deadly weapon.

The next day, the local police, agents from the Department of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the FBI, and Homeland Security raided several houses of folks that had been arrested. In one of those houses, they alleged that someone else that had been at the detention center was present, and they arrested that person. Following this, one of the defendants called their spouse on the phone, they had a conversation and after that phone call, the FBI decided to start surveilling that spouse. They claim that the spouse was obstructing justice, that they may have moved a box of whatever. The spouse, you know, took some zines to a friend’s house. Authorities then arrested the spouse and raided the house that the spouse had been in. They have been raiding the houses of defendants basically since people have been arrested and since the federal charges have dropped.

I should explain at this point there are two cases right now for people. There is the state case that’s happening in which people have two charges, which are terrorism and aggravated assault either with a firearm or with a deadly weapon. And then then the original 10 people arrested also have federal charges and those federal charges are three counts of attempted murder of federal agent and then three counts of discharging a firearm within a violent crime. There’s some other language there but that’s basically what it means so where things are at. The spouse of the defendant that was arrested has not received any state charges. They have received federal obstruction of justice charges and their case is proceeding at a different pace than the other 10 peoples cases.

Where we’re at right now is that in Texas people have seen a magistrate or judge that has set the original 10 peoples bonds at $10 million each, $5 million for each charge, which is impossible even 10% of that is $1 million dollars so people have to sit in jail until their indictment. In Texas, if you’re sitting in jail the district attorney has 90 days to indict you. Right now, the challenge that we’re facing is that the US Supreme Court interpretation is that until you are charged, you do not have a need for a public defender to be assigned to you. Which is like flapping insane because in Texas if you’re not in jail they can take up to a year to indict you. You could literally be living your life without a lawyer potentially having charges come down at any time. One of the big things we’re trying to do is to get people lawyers right now because the authorities are refusing to let people complete their paperwork for a public defender.

The other thing that’s happened is that people have these federal charges and the person who is the spouse of the defendant who was arrested by the FBI has no state charges, their case is moving at a different pace because they have a different set of charges they have been charged with. They’ve been charged with obstruction of justice there’s also an immigration hold on them as well so their case is proceeding faster because we think the state charges don’t exist. Right now folks, in terms of their federal case, they have not seen a judge in their initial hearing to get a federal public defender assigned to them. A lot of folks are sitting in jail right now and we are trying to find them lawyers.

One of the things that we have encountered that’s interesting is that Johnson County is notorious and lawyers are very hesitant to take cases in Johnson County because Johnson County does things like detain lawyers and like really make it difficult for lawyers to try a case. So we’re in this interesting position where it seems like the government is really trying to slow everything down so that right folks’s cases are uh slow-motion. They are not getting their legal representation and they can continue to do things like they put defendants in solitary confinement. We have a defendant who’s been stuck in a medical cell, a tiny white box, not allowed visits, has to put their hand out of the door to get on a phone call. You know, pretty bad conditions. People are being really targeted and harassed in the Johnson County jail right now that are the defendants. We’ve had people, loved ones, that have gone down to try and visit the defendants and they have been detained and questioned. It’s pretty intense and during this context. The FBI has continued to raid defendants houses and that has resulted in defendants families partners and loved ones being detained and questioned. We expect that that harassment is going to continue.

I think we’re also concerned that the Trump administration is going to use this as a context to do sort of a wider investigation into the left social movement even more. We could see something like a special grand jury being impaneled. In terms of why this case matters, I think one of the things that people need to understand is that this case is a watershed moment for anyone right now who is fighting, dissenting, rebelling against this administration and the actions of the United States and capital. How much we fight this case is going to show to this administration how hard they can push further and so we feel that it’s really important to fight tooth and nail against this case. Not only because these are people that we love but also because we know that if we don’t fight now that this could be used over and over again against people.

I think it’s important to understand the Trump administration is doing a couple of things. One, the Trump administration is trying to take right wing extremist action and create a narrative that those people are like sort of nihilist leftist people. That is one of the things, people have called it like “weird terrorism” or like “extreme nihilism”. But that is one of the things we’re seeing the Trump administration try to do is to be like “oh these far-right people actually are connected to leftists because they’re nihilists,” right?

TFSR: Which is really in some ways not a new narrative right because the anti-extremism that the Democrats have been pushing for a long time has been couching both groups under the same tent but been calling White Nationalists “anti-government extremists” and putting them in the same category as anarchists yeah yeah yeah…

DFWSC: Yes, yes, yes. Yeah it’s a real problem. They’re not on our team! [laughs]

TFSR: This comes after recently after a young man who was alleged to have white nationalist leanings started a fire to ambush and shoot firefighters in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, killing two firefighters and injuring a third before taking his own life. And so this seems like another example like the one you’re kind of pointing to. I think of Trump’s “both sides” rhetoric, famously that he pulled out after the riot in Charlottesville in 2017.

DFWSC: Yeah, right. Right. And I think it’s a way for them to distance themselves from sort of… in Texas we would call them the “lone wolf” kind of gunman people. I think the Trump administration needs militia groups, needs groups like the proud boys to act as its soldiers on the ground, especially in this deportation effort. But I think they want to distance themselves from the most extreme element and, like you said, continue the sort of narratives that include those people into the left. That is a real problem because we are not white nationalists at all –

it’s not where we’re at. So, I think that that piece is really important and that we really have to fight it.

I think the other piece of this is that the Trump administration is really interested in saying that everybody on the left is the same, DSA is the same as an anarchist, and we would say “no!” In terms of the Trump administration, they’re demonizing these defendants and I think they’re really trying to make the case that AOC and that part of the Democratic party are just as dangerous. And that they should also face the same kind of charges. I think that, again, the importance of understanding that we really have to pool resources nationally and support the 11 people who are fighting these cases. The 10 people that are on the federal murder charges and the person who’s charged with obstruction of justice.

I also think that there are probably other people will be charged as well, that’s what they’re saying. You know so it’s important for us to really fight this case so that we show that we are strong and to stop the way forward that the Trump administration is attempting. Because if we can fight a case like this, we also need to think about how we’re fighting the kidnappings and the renditions that are happening. We cannot continue to have people disappeared off the streets, we cannot continue to have people have their children ripped out of their arms and sent into an unmarked car going who knows where. This is the stuff of nightmares and I think unfortunately we are at a place in history where we cannot be on the sidelines anymore. People cannot be on the sidelines, this is the time for you to step off the sidelines and pick a battle. So, think this is one place where people can really make that choice and support these folks in fighting this case.

I think the next couple weeks are going to be really crucial in terms of the narrative that’s out there in the world right because one of the things that’s really crazy about right now is that news cycles go so quickly and it does seem from the conversations I’ve had with people that this story has been really buried. It’s gotten a little bit of news coverage but it seems like there’s probably some reasons why it’s not being picked up as widely. So getting the word out that this is happening is also really important and that people are you know fighting for their lives. I mean folks are looking at spending the rest of their lives in in prison on these charges. These are not light charges and these are people that have kids, these are people that have families and the fact that there’s a potentiality for them to never come out and see their children again to miss their graduations, to miss them growing up you know for us to not have our friends…

TFSR: Or to get sent to El Salvador… The whole basis of the charges against people accused of being members of Tren de Aragua or MS13 or whatever was making the argument that they’re terrorists…

DFWSC: Exactly, yeah. Or they might get sent out of the country. I think that’s a real scary thing. The last thing I also want to point to is exactly what you’re saying. That the Trump administration is picking up people saying their tattoos mean that they’re gangs and we know it’s BS. I think people of a liberal persuasion are confused about this case and are scared about it and I think we have to support people to move through that, and understand that this is BS and that you need to support these people. Because the Trump administration is not going to distinguish between a Democrat wanting to vote and our comrades who are sitting in jail right now right. They want all of the left to disappear, they want us all to be quiet

TFSR: How can people learn more and offer support and is there anywhere that they can keep an eye out for further information or reach out to y’all to get involved?

DFWSC: Yes. So we have a fundraiser right now that’s on GiveSendGo.com/SupportDFWProtestors. And the link will be in the shownotes. And then we have an email address, DFWSupportCommittee@hacari.com.

Right now, the two biggest asks are… There are some graphics going around Instagram and social media about the fundraiser: we ask that people share those. We ask that people share the fundraiser. We ask that people give to the fundraiser if they can. Even $5, right? Like anything you can give. Also talk to the people in your life about what’s happening with this.

If you are out there, engage in activity around any of the many things in our society, in our world that’s like worth fighting right now. Like I think looking at this case and thinking about your own safety and putting things in place like filling out jail support forms, having conversations with the people in your life, in secure ways, about getting prepared for repression to happen, I think is incredibly important right now. Please make sure that someone in your life has your full legal name so they can look your name up in a jail booking if they need to. That’s very important. Things like that, that can make the process of supporting you if you have been arrested, just more smooth. And then also really thinking about what you need to do to ensure that you are not arrested because now really sucks as a time to be arrested. It always sucks, but now especially.

. …. . ..

Save The Woods

Callie: I am Callie Warner, and I am one of the folks who have been campaigning against the destruction of the UNCA forest.

Heather: And my name is Heather Rayburn. I’m an alumni of UNCA. I’ve lived next to UNCA for the last 30 years. I’m a native to Asheville, and my hobby is I go out and do butterfly surveys for the Carolina Butterfly Monitoring Project and the Carolina Butterfly Society.

TFSR: Very cool. We got in touch because you’re a part of an effort to stop the destruction of the forest in North Asheville’s Five Points neighborhood, calling itself Friends of the Woods. When I lived in the area and walked through the forest, the neighborhood called it the Experimental Forest. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about the dimensions of the woods, the communities—human and non—that reside in or use the forest, and what distinguishes it inside of Asheville.

Heather: Okay, well, it’s 45 acres. It has been used by professors and students for experiments, and it’s been used recreationally by the community as a place to walk and enjoy nature. The students love it as a place to get away and get a mental health break. It supports a huge variety of species of wildlife. I have recorded 13 species of butterfly in there, but there’s surely more because it’s not part of my regular survey route. A neighbor, over the years, has recorded more than 100 different species of birds. It’s a spot where the northern long-eared bat spends part of its life cycle, and that’s an endangered species. You regularly see bears there. There’s a photographer who takes a lot of pictures there, and he documented great horned owls this year, and they are there every year. Everybody enjoys seeing them.

It’s a place where you meet your neighbors. So many people, including local politicians, reminisce about this property. These guys, they think, “Oh, it’s just neighbors who care about this,” but so many people have gone to UNCA or live next to UNCA and enjoy this rare place. It’s a rare urban forest. This is a bigger issue than just our neighborhood. People love these woods, and they appreciate these woods. We’ve got Brian Turner, who used to work at UNCA, he’s our state representative. He exercised in those woods. Carrie Wells, who’s on the county commission, she used to live near those woods. She said she went there every day. So it’s a really important place for people and a really beautiful place for people and animals.

Callie: And we have about 14,000 signatures from folks who have spent time in those woods, and they’re from all walks of life in Asheville, all corners of Buncombe County. I don’t live near those woods but I care deeply about them, especially in light of the hurricane. Over 40% of Buncombe County’s trees were damaged and destroyed during the hurricane, and it doesn’t make sense, especially now, that we have an urban forester in the budget. Asheville has got to recognize that it needs to be saving its trees, not destroying more, especially when there are other places on campus. In this 210 acre millennial campus, there are other places within that designation that make much more sense and would be much less destructive.

Heather: By the way, Callie”s on the tree commission.

Callie: Yeah, I’ve been on the tree protection task force for about 10 years now, and we worked so hard to get an urban forester in the budget, and now we have it. But the thought of destroying this particular forest, especially because it’s uphill of the botanical gardens. When you take that much it’s a carbon sequestration of like 2.2 million gallons of water a year, and you can’t expect to wipe out an entire forest and replace it with impervious surfaces and not expect to have serious runoff and flooding. Broadway already floods, and we know how much more flooding we’re getting now that our rivers are geologically different and transformed permanently. We are going to be seeing a whole lot more flooding so it’s important that we recognize that there are places for development and there are places that should not be. Our air, our water, it’s all connected.

The students really come to UNCA because of the forests and because of these mountains. I interviewed so many of them when we were on campus. I would go to campus and just interview students. “How do you feel about these woods? What brought you to UNCA?” All of them said it was because of these beautiful mountains. They love nature. The chancellor mentioned that she wanted to attract a different kind of student. And I don’t exactly know what she means by that, but I will say as a master’s person from NC State in landscape architecture, I can’t see the students that I was in school with at NC State coming to UNCA. There’s a difference here. This school grew out of the Black Mountain College. It had a lot of the arts and liberal arts, and all of that is the foundation of this university. It doesn’t make sense to try and attract different students when other state-run universities get those students.

Heather: Maybe we should tell the audience about how this came about.

TFSR: You’ve told us a lot about the ecological importance and the cultural relevance of the woods, but your website saveuncawoods.org talks about some other interesting historical things. Would you mind referencing a few of those real quick for the audience?

Callie: Well, part of it was a dairy farm.

Heather: And then in 1960 there was a public bond issued to buy this property, I believe. Then they expanded the university. So this property was bought with a public bond. The school is funded mostly with public dollars that come from the state legislature. The people who get to choose who are on the Board of Governors is the majority in the state legislature, which right now is the Republican Party. We’re a non-partisan group, because we want the university to thrive, and we believe this is important to everybody, no matter what their party. But they choose who’s on the Board of Governors. They choose people who don’t have the same values as us.

There’s dollar value in what you don’t destroy, right? But the way that they think is, “Higher education, we don’t want to fund that,” because they think that it’s indoctrination; liberal arts, “Who needs philosophy?” and that sort of thing. They’re wanting to turn the school more into STEM. But guess what? Kids who go to schools for STEM love green space, and they need it too. So they starve universities of public funding. And now the Board of Governors, the UNCA Board of Trustees want to take this public property and go into public-private partnerships with developers to raise funds that they’re starved off from the very party that’s keeping them underfunded. What they’ve come up with is this thing called Millennial Campus Legislation. It actually started under a Democrat, and it doesn’t have to be a sinister thing. You could go into a public-private partnership and build a research facility or something educational. But what it’s turned out to be is that it’s going away from the mission of education into making the mission of the schools into developers.

Callie: As Heather said, it is supposed to be these millennial campuses, since the money just goes back into the Millennial Campus. Then it’s unclear if any of it would go into education at all. So basically the developer gets financed with a mix of money from a university’s endowment and foundation as well as from private developers, but what happens is they’re going to have, like, a 90-year lease. The developer will have this decades-long lease and the ownership of the valuable revenue generating buildings, the university will get a portion of that revenue, plus new student housing, all without having to spend taxpayer money, which sounds great, but because of legislation that is before the legislature now got slipped into the budget, the 700 page budget, is a bill that basically exempts millennial campuses from any environmental oversight, and that has been witnessed as a negative thing at Western Carolina. On their millennial campus, they built this housing, and it ended up damaging the student housing that was below it in a mud slide. Neither the city, the county, nor Western Carolina itself, were able to do anything to hold the developer accountable.

Heather: They got 16 notices of violation for erosion problems, and Western Carolina said, “Oh, we’re sorry this happened, but our hands are tied because of this long term lease.” They moved students in there before all this mess was fixed, and they’re like, “We’ll do better next time.” And the way that this legislation works is that the university asked for certain parcels of their property to be called Millennial Campus, and a millennial campus property is then exempt from the Olmstead Act, which is a law in North Carolina that says that a government can’t be in competition with private business because it’s an unfair advantage. So the millennial campus gives an exemption to that, and then the university goes to this Board of Governors and says, “Will you designate this property as a millennial campus?” And they’re like, “Oh, sure,” because then the university suddenly becomes, what would you say, in economic development. That’s suddenly what their purpose is. So UNCA, they say, “Oh, we’re so broke and poor.” Well, okay, when I’m having problems with my budget, what I do is I cut back. I don’t go and into a whole new venture. I cut back. What they do is they say, “Oh, we don’t have any capital to expand our campus.” Well, maybe that’s not what you should be doing.

Edward Abbey said, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” In our way of doing things, as Americans, it’s like, grow, grow, grow, even though resources are limited. So what their answer is to their budget problems and their demographic problems—because fewer people are going to college—their answer to attract people is, “Let’s develop every bit of green space that we have.” And you would think, if they had a more progressive mindset, they would say, “Well, let’s develop the surface parking lots first or land that’s already cleared.”

Callie: Like the Health Adventure site, which is across from these 45 acres across Broadway. It’s already been destroyed of trees, and it’s a perfect place to put the housing.

Heather: Yeah, it’s been sitting there for 10 years, but they have super grand intentions. They want to turn this campus into something way bigger.

Callie: The other thing, too, is that they want to build a 5000 seat soccer arena. The question that I have is UNCA plans to seek $29 to $30 million in public funds, and the rest they expect the developer to put in. Well, we, the city of Asheville just committed $30 million last year to the redevelopment of the tourist stadium. So that is coming out of our tax dollars. So we foot the bill for the McCormick field, and then we’re going to also foot the bill for this 5000 seat arena.

And the other thing, it’ll be used maybe 90 additional dates for concerts and events, in addition to being used by four soccer teams, which would be the UNCA men’s and women’s and Asheville City men’s and women’s. But the community should question the feasibility of that, because soccer schedules dominate April, May, and June and September and October. That only leaves July and August for the outside events that UNCA is suggesting, and these two months are typically the very least desirable for outdoor concerts due to the heat and higher chance of thunderstorms.

So when you look at the various large event spaces, Asheville currently has from Highland Brewery to what used to be Rabbit Rabbit (and has changed its name downtown to something, I can’t remember what it is), to Pisgah, we have all these breweries that have large outdoor spaces for concerts. Asheville is not big enough to sustain that much, and we would be paying for it. I think that is something that we want the university to do some real serious market research on, and they have not done that.

Heather: It doesn’t seem like they’ve done any market research. They just came up with it. They pulled this out of their pantaloons. At other campuses, they go into a public-private partnership, say with a hotel. They did this in Charlotte. With the hotel, they don’t have to put up any of their money. Marriott puts up the money to build a hotel. They get a lease. That money they get from the lease, they can only put it into their other millennial campus projects. They can’t put it into their general budget. But you know, there are these shell games that they do. If they have their some sort of conference at the the Marriott, they can use millennial campus money to run their conference, so they don’t have to spend that other general budget. That’s my understanding.

Callie: The other thing is, Brookings [Institute] did an article about these big arenas, and they said, America is in the midst of a sports construction boom, and new sports facilities costing at least $200 million each have been completed in all these cities around America. So Asheville, and I’m sure the city council and our mayor are seeing this as looking ahead: “How do we build our tax base in Asheville? This is a way we can do it.” It’s on state-owned lands, so we’re not getting the tax benefits from it. So 10 facilities built in the ‘70s and ‘80s, including the Superdome in New Orleans, the Silver Dome in Pontiac, the now-obsolete Kingdom in Seattle, and Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands, each cause an annual federal tax loss exceeding $1 million. So these these arenas are not making money, they are actually costing more, and that is an important thing to realize. We need to have market research done on “Will this actually make money?” Because what they’re proposing is taking that 45 acres and putting a 5000 seat arena, plus a bunch of market-rate housing, not affordable housing for students, but market-rate housing.

There are three swales on that property. When it rains, those swales take the water. If you put pavement over those swales, and pavement on all of those 45 acres, you’re going to end up with sinkholes.

Heather: They’ll level that all out, Callie.

Callie: They’ll level it all out. But it’s like Merriman Avenue down there. We have sink holes from all the way up Merriman, because they built it over a swale and over a creek. You can’t cover these things up and expect it not to eventually have sink holes. Imagine playing soccer and then things, you know, whatever.

Heather: So they have their property designated as millennial campus under this legislation, and that means that the local community has no say over it. It doesn’t go through our technical review committee because of this legislation. It doesn’t go to our city council like a project this size normally would. Then they stuck this new thing in the state budget to where it doesn’t even have to go under a noise ordinance or whatnot.

So this is a publicly-funded school, and they’re sitting on public property, and the people that are working in the shadows that want all this don’t have to go under our tree ordinance. They don’t have to take into consideration our climate goals here in Asheville and Buncombe County. UNCA is a publicly-funded school sitting on public property, and the people working in the shadows want $29 million in public funding. They want to level our forest for the profit of private developers through millennial campus legislation that gives the public zero say in the project.

So we’ve gone and we’ve asked the city council, our local legislators, and next week we’re asking the public to go to the county commission meeting, because our local people don’t have legislative control over this project happening, but they do have a lot of soft power. And they can issue resolutions in favor of this forest staying, because there are so many good reasons for this forest to remain a forest. Not only good reasons that make sense to the community but to the university.

Callie: They just created a master’s program in, what is it, Biology?

Heather: Yeah, environmental resilience. One of their biggest draws is the environmental undergraduate degree, and they want to destroy a forest for this ridiculous project that they don’t seem to have even done any marketing research for. When the Chancellor presented it a couple of weeks ago to the Board of Governors’ financial committee. She didn’t even have a profit loss statement to share with them. Then they asked for that, and they asked, Art Pope asked, “Does your city council approve of this?”

Callie: The other thing is one of the members of the Tree Protection Task Force is a landscape architect who has done a lot of work in the I-26 corridor, and she did a lot of work in University of Georgia and Georgia Tech. She’s brilliant. She went over to where the existing soccer field is on campus, and measured everything: rise and run, the whole nine yards. And that existing soccer field is the place that a 5000 seat arena could go and should go. It has big lights already there. It’s close to the highway. It has no neighborhood. It’s not going to affect a very well-established, old neighborhood in Asheville known as Five Points. It has a parking deck. It can add more parking on top of the existing parking deck.

She did a design that basically makes that whole area, the sports area, and that would cost a lot less money than what it will cost for them to take out all those trees and destroy all of that and flatten everything, and do what they would have to do to the forest. Why do that when they already have a soccer field? If they instead took the design over and did what this landscape architect has done, and they kept the forest as it is, for classrooms and for all things, it would end up being such a boon to the university. We have other schools in North Carolina. Warren Wilson put this land in conservation, and they got a huge endowment for that, and alumni will give more money to the university if they save the forest and make their actions for within this millennial campus be environmentally good.

We have to think about this for future, especially in light of [Hurricane] Helene. It doesn’t make sense for them to come in and put it there when they already have a soccer field. They can put all the housing over there on the Health Adventure site across Broadway, and they wouldn’t have all this negativity from the community. UNCA has always worked with Asheville. It’s been a really good partnership. This is going to destroy the relationship between the university and Asheville.

Heather: It is destroying it.

Callie: Yeah, and it’s going to really destroy the desire—who’s going to want to go to the arena when you realize that this arena and these buildings that they have proposed are right in the backyard of all these people who live in Five Points? Their property values are going to plummet.

Heather: Oh, they don’t care.

Callie: They don’t care, but there’s no reason why the university has to do it the way they’re doing it.

Heather: They’re shameless. They released a plan with no buffer between this stadium and the neighborhood. The only tree buffer was around the Chancellor’s house. And the Chancellor went to the Board of Governors, and she said, “Oh, this is just an empty piece of unused land.” That’s how they view this. But of course, that’s a lie, because it’s not just a useless, unused piece of land. And she’s going to get all kinds of bonuses for turning the campus around. But she’s been here for more than a year. She is not registered to vote here. She is registered to vote in Hillsboro, where her farm is. She’s going to ruin this place, get her bonuses and leave, and we’re going to be left picking up the pieces, and as taxpayers paying for all their erosion, paying in misery and the urban heat island when we lose this forest…

TFSR: When you had gone to the city council meeting before, did you have much response?

Are there any local politicians or developers that are pushing for the UNCA to do this thing or do they have any sort of leverage in there? Because it sounds like it’s being decided at a state level anyway, right?

Heather: It’s being decided at a state level. But we’ve got to come together as a community to start fighting for our place here. Bo Hess is all for a resolution. He just wrote an excellent guest editorial in the Asheville Citizen Times.

Callie: He’s our city council member.

Heather: City council member. City council member Kim Roney wants to see a resolution passed. Drew Ball on the county commission wants to see UNCA talk to this community. They have ideas for how the city and county, along with land trusts, along with the community, could help UNCA achieve their goals without destroying this urban forest. Potentially monetizing it in a way that will be palatable to UNCA, to leave it as an amenity for the campus educational place, the outdoor labs. But also a woodland public park that would benefit everybody and that would further draw people here. It would also be a beautiful wildlife corridor that already links the botanical garden, the greenways, and all the wonderful native plant landscaping that UNCA is famous for.

Callie: And when you were asking about the rest of the city council, we haven’t really gotten a read on the other city councils. Sage Turner, she sits on the Asheville-Buncombe Regional Sports Commission. So, we’re asking Sage why UNCA is seeking public funding for the proposed Asheville City Soccer Club soccer stadium when the city council and the county commission and the Tourism Development Authority (TDA) have already promised their piggy banks to McCormick Field. If the stadium gets public money, then we’ll have two shiny new venues clawing over the same handful of big events after sinking tax dollars into both. So we don’t have any proof that McCormick Field is going to draw the concerts.

We don’t have any proof that we can have two big arenas in this size of town end up making money. It just does not, it doesn’t, there’s too many questions and too many loopholes.

And what we are afraid of is that because of the history of what happened at Western Carolina and other millennial campuses, they could come in and wipe out the forest and then decide not to do anything. And then we would have lost this beautiful, valuable, incredibly important…

Heather: The economy could crash and then we’d be left with like the property down on Broadway for the last 10 years: no trees, just an empty lot.

But you’re asking about local political support. Early on, a group from Save the Woods met with the mayor and she said that she couldn’t say what was going there, but that Asheville would like it and she seemed like she was in favor of it.

We recently asked the people on our petition list if they would take action with a email that would go to all the decision makers and, but also our local, our local politicians. And so after more than a thousand people, more than a thousand emails went to all the city councilors, the county commissioners, the board of governors, the board of trustees… By the way, the board of trustees and board of governors, none of them have responded to emails.

But after that, the mayor did respond to the emails saying that she, she hears us. She doesn’t have any power to change this, but that she, she understands what’s going on. And she has made some calls on our behalf and Maggie Allman has said that she’s, she doesn’t want to see this forest destroyed.

Callie: So what we have is a resolution that we are presenting to the city council. And we want four, if we can get four members of city council and the mayor to sign this resolution, basically saying that what UNCA wants to do is fine, but not where they want to do it. And that there are better ways to do it that are much more environmentally better and financially better. So if they sign the resolution, then even though they can’t affect any of what happens, the fact that UNCA has always worked with the city means that this will be the first time that the university is just basically doing whatever they want to do, regardless of how the city feels and how the residents feel. And that is going to come back and bite them because you have to work with others, especially in a public institution, you have to be willing to compromise yourselves and to look at something like this and go, “you know what, you’re right. This is in the wrong place.”

TFSR: And so you’re going to county commissioners up this coming or next week, I guess, right? Is it the 15th?

Heather: Well, yeah, the July 15th. And we would love your listeners to come out and, and, you know, speak out and say, we know that you can’t affect this legally. But like Callie said, this university, even though they’re operating as if we don’t matter, the people of Asheville and Buncombe County that we don’t matter, their neighbors don’t matter. Then the soccer club, the same thing. And we’ve talked to soccer fans that we’ve leafleted three of their games and the soccer people are like, “No, we don’t need this forest to disappear. We don’t want that.” So, you know, we’re not saying no to soccer.

We want your listeners to go talk because, you know, it’s one thing like I’ve been an environmental activist for years and people think, oh, if I go to a protest, I’ve done my part, but we’ve got to do our part in a really active and quick way here. We’ve got to go talk to the political people.

On Friday, we’re going, the UNC, a board of trustees are meeting. We’ve got to go, we’ve got to show up there. We’ve got to let them see the people that they’re hurting face to face. Because so far there’s, there’s a board of governor, Carolyn Coward. She works in the same law office as Esther Manheimer. We want a meeting with her. We’ve sent, we’ve left voice messages. We’ve sent emails. She will not respond to us. We want a meeting with her. We want, we don’t want to have an ugly confrontation. That’s not what it’s about. We want to talk to her human to human. You, this is what you’re doing to this community.

Callie: And also to get answers. What, you know, since they have not done any mark, any kind of spreadsheets on any facts of how arenas, the success of arenas across the country, which is proving to not be successful. We’re not even getting them to say, “Oh, maybe this isn’t such a great idea.”

And the other thing I want to mention is that when we met with the chancellor and she said, we are going for a different kind of student, what she needs to understand is that the Gen Z crowd, they are extremely engaged in social and environmental issues. They are very concerned about transparency and authenticity. And they want to support a college that literally is walking the walk of the rhetoric they have in their brochures. And the UNCA rhetoric is sustainability and appreciation of trees. And Asheville is a tree city USA. Well, how do we keep that distinction? And how do we further that, which would be a much better for tourism… Tourists don’t want to go to a decimated area that’s hot. They’ve got that in their own hometown of Charlotte. They want to come here because it’s cooler and it’s greener and it’s connected. And there are all these pathways and beautiful neighborhoods that they can walk through. So, you know, if they, the Gen Z crowd is not going to be happy if this forest is gone and they’re not going to come here.

Heather: I think when she says a different kind of student, she’s talking about… there’s a cultural shift at UNCA. You know, they painted over the Black Lives Matter mural. They got rid of the pride flags. Who’s this different kind of student? And can you ensure that this different kind of student comes here? Because, yeah, like Callie said, the young people, they’re concerned, even her different kind of student, whoever that is, they’re concerned about the environment and they want to come here for the green. It’s just, this is just all like a horrible nightmare that these people are dreaming up in their heads.

Callie: These are major risks when you don’t get the citizen and city council support.

Heather: Major risks and your community. And not only that, they’re not working transparently. And the student government, the SGA, student government at UNCA, they passed a resolution. They don’t want to see this forest go. But they also are really ticked about the lack of transparency and lack of listening on behalf of this new chancellor and this whole shift away from the things that they think are important.

We have asked, and they’re legally obligated to fulfill their public records request. We have public records requests that are outstanding since January 29th. They will not answer our questions. They will not release those public documents.

Callie: And so how are we supposed to feel safe and comfortable with their decision-making when they have been doing all this backdoor dealings? We don’t trust them. They have not given us any reason to trust them. When we have been totally open, willing to talk to them, wanting to share, wanting to come

up with best solutions that the community and the university can work together, that has been our goal from the start, which is why we have people from all over the county joining us in this. And a lot of them love soccer. My son played soccer. I love soccer. But I don’t want to wipe out this beautiful forest to get it when they already have a site that they could put it on.

So we are really asking, and anyone who’s interested needs to go to saveuncawoods.org and sign our petition. And we are raising money. We have a fiscal sponsor out of Raleigh, so we’re a 501c3 through them and we’re getting legal help. And we need to raise money because all of this costs money. We’ve got a billboard on Merriman Avenue that we’re going to have for another month. We want to do billboards. We also have to reach Raleigh with this because the legislature and Board of Governors are the ones deciding all this. And so our marketing needs to get across the state and the urgency of this message.

So we really want to get anyone and everyone who survived the hurricane who is still having PTSD from the loss of trees and wants to see Asheville rebuild with true resiliency, environmental resiliency, and choices that are going to be long-term benefits, they need to come on our website because we’re building this bigger than this 45 acres.

TFSR: Thank you so much for this conversation., I really appreciated it.

. … . ..

A Better World Book Fair

Beet: So I’m Beet, I go by he/they. I’m a queer artist and local organizer, living on occupied Monacan land. I’m here on behalf of the Shenandoah Liberation Collective.

Mad Dog: I’m a longtime listener, first-time caller. Mad Dog here, he/him. Also on occupied Monacan land and also part of the Shenandoah Liberation Collective.

TFSR: I’m glad you all are here. Thanks for having the conversation. Do you want to say a few things about the Shenandoah Liberation Collective, what the project is, who’s in it, that sort of stuff?

Beet: Sure, so the Shenandoah liberation Collective is a small group doing mutual aid and collective care work in Shenandoah Valley. We’re interested in doing small mutual aid and collective care work from an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-authoritarian, and anti-imperialist perspective. We started meeting in the spring of 2024, originally as a book club, and quickly started realizing that we weren’t the only leftists in the area that needed community or felt isolated because we live in a fairly rural area.

Mad Dog: Adding to that, like you said, we started a single issue group around a campaign trying to stall or prohibit and resist the building of military testing facility in our town. We quickly realized that base building is important to maintaining momentum, so we pivoted to a more broader approach of setting up care networks, like Beet was saying.

TFSR: So we’re here to speak about A Better World Bookfair. Can you talk a bit about what’s planned, the scope of the event, and who are you hoping will attend?

Beet: Sure. The bookfair, thus far, we have it planned to be one day from 10am to 8pm. We’ve planned for a small, tight-knit gathering since it’ll be our first year trying something like this. We’re expecting a low turnout, but we’ll have group discussions and a stuff swap going on throughout the day, share a meal at 6:00pm, and then boogie until 8:00pm. We’ve also invited artists, mutual aid groups, and distros from around the region to table and attend. We’re particularly excited to have Blue Ridge Bail Fund, F12, Margaret Killjoy, and Molly Conger joining us.

In terms of who we would really like to come, we’re really hoping to facilitate an easy-going space for like-minded and like-hearted people to come together and connect. As we previously stated, Mad Dog and I live and organize in a fairly red, rural area where it’s easy for leftists to feel isolated or get radicalized in isolation. We’re really hoping to connect with local folks from the Shenandoah Valley since we personally feel like the next couple of years are going to be really hard to get through alone or by yourself. It would be super rad if we could get turn out from Harrisonburg to Roanoke or as far Richmond. We’d love to connect and get some lessons from those folks and the organizing they’ve been doing.

Mad Dog: I don’t know this for sure, but somebody mentioned that this very well could be the first anarchist gathering in the Shenandoah Valley. So we’re just trying set a standard to let people know that we’re out here and that we see them. I was flyering at an event a few weeks ago, and I saw somebody with some anti-fascist swag, and so I handed it to him, and he was like, “Wow, I’ve been living in Waynesboro my whole life, and I’ve never seen anything like this happening.” He just so excited that it’s happening. So just being able to give people hope.

TFSR: A chance to plug in and and make connections and build on the idea that y’all were doing. I have found before that a reading group is not the revolution, but a reading group can be a nice way to invite people together to have discussions, to build ideas together, to get to know each other, and build trust. And public events like this, I think, are similar. You may have friends that you already know, and it’s an opportunity to make friends that you didn’t know before.

Beet: Yeah, for me, that’s why I’m really excited for it to be a bookfair. I feel like it gives some of our friends who may be a little bit socially awkward or not used to socializing the chance to really engage with new people. I’m really excited to provide that venue for them.

TFSR: I’ve seen different communities, like the bookfair in that happens in Asheville annually, ACAB, calls itself an anarchist bookfair. The bookfair in Atlanta calls itself a radical bookfair. Does A Better World Bookfair identify as radical, anarchist, autonomous, or some other hyphen? And you mentioned that it’s a nice way for awkward people to come together. Why a bookfair, not a conference, or a summit, or some other adjective?

Mad Dog: We are billing it as an anarchist bookfair because most of us as organizers identify as anarchists, but we’re not exclusively inviting anarchist groups. We’re an anarchist organization, but we’re not limiting our scope, and we’re trying to cast a pretty wide net. We’ve got one comrade that we’ve been organizing with who’s invited a few Maoist groups. So anarchist with an asterisk. We have limited it so that we’re not inviting any nonprofits, or anyone for-profit too, unless you’re an independent artist.

TFSR: The shared values, maybe not everyone’s on exactly the same page, but you can have a conversation with each other sort of thing?

Mad Dog: Yeah. I should add that we’re really interested in building coalition because it is such a conservative area that we’ve got to identify each other and be ready to build coalition across ideological lines, as long as our goals are generally lining up in the immediate term.

Beet: If I could hop in and give my two cents. To answer your questions specifically on why we decided a bookfair and not a conference or a lecture, we’re really not trying to posit ourselves as authority figures. We want this fair to be conversational, both for people putting it together and also for participants. Part of the reason why I was hoping to put together a bookfair, I think, is it makes it clear that people aren’t necessarily coming in and expecting us to teach them things. We’re not the vanguard. We’re not authority figures. We’re co-facilitators, co-learners. We’re in this together.

Mad Dog: And books are great. Everybody should be reading more.

Beet: And books are great.

TFSR: So sort of like meeting people where they’re at and then moving forward with them.

Beet: Meeting people where they’re at. I think I mentioned before, we live in a fairly red, rural area, and something that I’ve been sitting with or noticing as a local organizer is folks are getting radicalized in isolation and not necessarily knowing where to go with these newfound feelings about the Empire. I’m hoping that this bookfair gives them the opportunity to sink their teeth into ideas that have already been percolating, meet people who are willing to have a dialog with them and to show them more. It’s really hard to disseminate information in this area. I think giving folks a physical venue to broaden their understanding of the current moment is really important.

TFSR: Yeah, I think it’s a thing that maybe is often commented on, but it just strikes me over and over again—maybe it’s partly the generation that I am as a late Gen Xer—of how people were lauding the ability to connect across the world through the internet, but it’s also so alienating and lacks so much intimacy and mutual investment. People can say the meanest stuff without probably immediate consequences on comment threads or on social media or whatever else, which doesn’t foster the best revolutionary perspective, I don’t think, or investment in the common desires of the people around you. This kind of gathering, I think, has a lot of value in that way of getting people to see each other eye-to-eye and actually invest in making choices like moving forward together

Beet: Yeah. I agree with you. As a late Gen Xer myself, I feel like that lack of mutual interest or mutual investment is the heart of what I’m trying, at least for me as one of the organizers, to address or challenge. Because it’s so easy for folks to abandon someone that they’re building community with or that they’re engaging in dialog with in the middle of the conversation, through discourse or in discord.

Mad Dog: It’s also good to just practice taking up space together, because that’s part of the process of undermining the status quo.

TFSR: Absolutely, that’s a good point also. You’ve talked a little bit about how conservative, how rural the area is. I wonder if you could speak a bit more about what Waynesboro is like? For me at least, you’re surprisingly close to Charlottesville and Richmond, so I imagine that you have some relationships there, but you’ve mentioned also wanting to build those out a little bit. What sort of organizing is going on in the area? How do anarchists relate to other locales? And what are some overlapping projects?

Mad Dog: Yeah, Waynesboro itself is a pretty small town, about 23,000 people. It had its heyday mid 20th century, like a big industrial boom, so now we’re a post-manufacturing kind of bedroom community for Charlottesville, because housing prices were getting so crazy over there. It’s always been kind of a waypoint. Early on, Shenandoah Valley has been used as a migratory hunting grounds. Then with European settlement, Waynesboro became a stopover. After you cross the Blue Ridge Mountains, it’s the first town on the other side of a gap. It’s been a waypoint for the railroads. There’s a major East-West and North-South interstate close by. The Appalachian Trail runs right by. It really close to Shenandoah National Park. It’s always been a kind of a crossroads, a convergence. I think that we’re going to try and lean into that tradition by bringing people from up and down the valley and from the other side of the mountains. And you’re totally right. We do have connections in Charlottesville and Richmond. There’s an info shop in Charlottesville that is going to be coming over, F12, bringing lots of books. They’re going to be our main book purveyor.

So other organizing in the area. There’s been some organizing going on around affordable housing, immigration, specifically Know Your Rghts trainings. We’re doing some mutual aid, a little bit of harm reduction. In the wider area we’ve been connecting with groups that are doing a lot of Palestine solidarity work in Harrisonburg and Roanoke. There are a lot of smaller groups that are doing a lot of work, but spread out over a pretty large geographical area, so we’re hoping to get representatives from all these groups and organizations in the same place so we can facilitate open conversation.

TFSR: How far out are you advertising? I’m curious, because I feel like Roanoke and surrounding areas have a few colleges, and then Charlottesville and obviously Richmond too. I got into politics before college, but that was a big place where I kind of cut my teeth and started getting into some of the ideas that I’m into now and building relationships. I know here, college students may get involved in politics, but oftentimes they’re disconnected from the community in which the college is in because they’re transferring from somewhere else or they live in another part of the state or another part of the country and will come out do their schooling, be their new selves, and then go back to where they’re coming from. Out of curiosity, are you all trying to get students to come and say hi and such, or is that not a thing?

Mad Dog: Yeah, I think so. We haven’t been targeting colleges and universities specifically, but we’ve got students who are organizing with us in our group, like at Mary Baldwin, which is in Staunton. We’ve organized with JMU students from Harrisonburg, and I’m sure that they’re involved in some of the organizations that we’ve been inviting. So I think it makes its way throughout the radical “activist milieu.” For the past two or three years, there’s been a pretty large Signal network of a lot of overlapping causes and orgs. I’m hoping that it will get disseminated at least throughout student organizations who have been following our work and we’ve been following their work.

I should speak to overlapping projects too. I feel like we all formed Shenandoah Liberation Collective through other work that we were doing through nonprofits, and we all found each other through more traditional liberal organizing. Most of us are still involved in those orgs as well, but we’re able to break off and do our own thing, which is fun.

TFSR: So the event itself is a great outcome to hope for, that folks will get to have a good time and that things will go smoothly. Maybe also you might fund a project or uplift some groups and initiatives through putting the event on. It might be a fundraiser. Are there any hopes that you’re pulling for to come out of both the organizing effort and the experience in the community?

Beet: Yeah, we’re really hoping organizing this nurtures our group. If anything comes out of it, it’d be nice to plant some seeds in the community, to bring people together, and to showcase that there’s still joy in resisting outside of liberal activism. It’d be really cool too if this event results in creating some relationships and lasting networks of collective care throughout the region.

Mad Dog: Yeah, this kind of long term thinking, but I hope that it’s able to foster and bolster a more honed resistance movement in our area and throughout the region more generally, sending out signal flares and gathering people like we’ve been saying,

TFSR: Are there any other bookfairs that you’ve decided to like to model this off of or any other events that you’ve attended that that have inspired what your collective is envisioning?

Mad Dog: Yeah. Both of us were fortunate enough to make it to the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair last year. Pretty much as soon as we got back, we were like, “Okay, when can we do our own?” It was such a good time, and it seemed like something that we could replicate on a smaller scale and be able to bring a little bit of that back to where we’re from.

TFSR: Yeah, that’s great. My understanding is that’s one of the goals of the bookfair: to draw conversations around the region and provide space for folks to share and have convos like what you’ve talked about, but also to inspire more localized events for these conversations to happen in smaller communities. I understand that this year, they’re planning on having a smaller, pared-down bookfair, besides having had Hurricane Helene hit the community pretty bad last year—That’s sort of a goal. I’m sure that organizers would be really happy to to know about y’all’s initiative.

Mad Dog: Yay, cool. Well, yeah, they were our inspiration.

Beet: I was beaming after leaving ACAB last year. My labor job is in the nonprofit sphere. Especially with the uptick in the violence in Gaza, I’ve been feeling really disheartened and in conflict with that work. But going to ACAB, it was really refreshing to be in such a caring and honestly autonomous space. It kind of reinvigorated my spirit, made me want to connect back with myself and my queerness, neurodivergency, and community. So I’m really excited to create this space.

TFSR: It’s a one-day affair, dinner at 6:00pm, boogie till 8:00pm. With folks, booksellers, including that info shop out of Charlottesville, are there discussions that are being facilitated and coordinated beforehand? Are there any presentations? Is it mostly just a space of encounter where rooms are opened up and you’ll see what kind of conversations happen? What sort of like structure are you putting to this?

Mad Dog: Good question. I feel like it’s still evolving. It’s been a process of change. When we started it, we thought that we might have to fill it out ourselves with talks and panels. But as soon as we started advertising, people have been reaching out to us saying, like, “Hey, I’d like to talk about Rojava.” And it’s like, oh, cool maybe we could set up a panel about international struggles. We’re definitely going to do some prisoner support, some letter writing, so that’ll be a panel. There’s at least one educator who’s going to be coming up and not sure if she’s giving a talk—the timing’s still fuzzy—but she’ll at least have a table on what schools are getting wrong.

Beet: Why does school lie?

Mad Dog: Yeah, that’s it. Thank you.

Beet: No worries. To add some more context, we’re hoping that this space can be both a point of convergence and also a point of learning. We are going to have a panel on prisoner support, food sovereignty from a trauma-informed kind of disability perspective, a regional power analysis, and— goodness, there was one other—a group reading on some Confucius literature.

Mad Dog: Molly and Margaret both have speaking slots, so we’ll have two talks. And I feel like we were going to try and make space for breakout discussions as well, because that was a component of ACAB that I really liked. There’s time set aside for people to break off and do your own strategizing.

Beet: It’s partially why I’m excited for the venue that we have. It’ll be small, but there’s enough space for folks to go off and hang out and have their own discussions or to attend a group discussion facilitated by some of the organizers. It’ll be a mixture of both that I’m really hyped for.

Mad Dog: We want people to eave feeling activated and empowered. We just want to give people the space to activate and empower themselves.

TFSR: Yeah, sort of the start of a conversation, I guess. So you were flyering for it. Are there ways for folks that don’t encounter one of the flyers to come across it? Do you have a website or any social media presence or anything like that?

Mad Dog: Yes, we do a Linktree. We’ve also got an Instagram account. We’ve got a Proton Mail address where people can email us to RSVP and let us know if they’ve got any dietary restrictions or other accessibility points.

TFSR: I guess that’s question I didn’t ask about. Is there accessibility beyond food? Are the venues wheelchair accessible? What have you all been thinking in terms of accessibility? There’s a lot to think about, obviously.

Beet: Right, thinking a lot about mobility, sensory. That’s partially why we’re hoping that it’s somewhat of a small gathering, to make sure no one gets overstimulated or freaked. The venue itself is wheelchair accessible. We have ramps and multiple points of access or entry, and I’ll have ear plugs, I’ll have stim toys, we’ll have a medic on site, just in case.

Mad Dog: And I feel like it’s worth it to mention that that we’ve changed venues like three times now, just based on accessibility. So it’s definitely been at the forefront as we’ve been planning this.

TFSR: That’s great. It feels like that’s a thing that is still after as long as the human species has existed secondary thought a lot, at least in our culture. So that’s awesome.

Mad Dog: Yeah, I loved y’all’s episode on disability justice.

TFSR: Yeah, I’m looking forward to having more of those.

Beet: There’s always time to do more. I agree with you. It’s always interesting to really sit with how little our dominant culture considers the impact of our spaces.

TFSR: Well, that’s all the questions that I had. Is there anything that I didn’t touch on that y’all wanted to bring up or discuss? Anything come to mind?

Mad Dog: I guess just emphasizing for people to show up, like how they can attend. Just come.

Beet: Yes, please.

Mad Dog: We’re all nice. We’ll be friends.

Beet: I think we did pretty good. I’d like to selfishly plug that our statement of intent will be up on our Linktree. Honestly, that’s the only thing I want to plug. We have a Linktree with RSVP and information about the event that’ll be up. I think that’s pretty much it.

Mad Dog: I’m not going to name everybody, but I want to shout out to everybody, all the orgs who’ve already RSVP’d, agreed to come, have expressed interest and excitement, because they’re the ones who are going to make this happen. We don’t take responsibility for it. It’s going to be made by the people who come.

The Final Straw Radio Podcast

DFW Support Committee, A Better World Bookfair + Save The UNCA Woods

DFW Support Committee

MAILING INSTRUCTIONS

NAMES AND BOOKING NUMBERS

A Better World Book Fair

Links

Save The UNCA Woods

Featured Track:

DFW Support Committee Transcription

Save The Woods

A Better World Book Fair

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