The Security State, Far Right and Media Post-January 6th
This week on the show, you’ll hear two segments: chat with Spencer Sunshine on the far right and the government’s reaction following the riot on January 6th in DC and some perspectives on political content removal and social media from anarchist media platforms ItsGoingDown and crimethInc.
Spencer Sunshine
First up, anti-fascist researcher Spencer Sunshine talks about the aftermath of the January 6th putsch attempt in DC, mainstream media and Democrat narratives of concerning domestic terrorism, reporting of participation of law enforcement and military in the riot, anti-fascist research, what the stepping down of Trump has meant for his radicalized base and Spencer’s thoughts on claims of rehabilitation by former White Nationalists like Matthew Heimbach. There was a good article published by IGD on the state’s response to January 6th and what it can mean to anti-repression activists here. Also, a great place to keep up on what’s going on in the far right in the so-called US, check out IGD’s “This Week In Fascism” column, soon to be a podcast.
CrimeThinc. and ItsGoingDown
Then, you’ll hear the main host from the ItsGoingDown Podcast and a comrade from CrimethInc (both affiliates of the Channel Zero Network) talking about implications for anarchists and antifascists of the silencing of far right platforms and accounts and how similar moves have silenced the anti-authoritarian left. We talk about perspectives the media may have missed around “deplatforming” by tech giants like Patreon, Facebook and Twitter and how easily the normalization of ejecting non-mainstream narratives follows the trail of profit and power, and the importance of building our own platforms and infrastructure.
Patreon Updates
A little housekeeping note. For those listeners able to support us on Patreon with recurring donations, we are still fundraising to pay comrades to transcribe and format our episodes into zines moving forward. We’ve started with January 2021, putting out a weekly transcript for translations, search-ability, access to non-aural learners and those with hearing difficulties as well as making it easier send these interviews into prisons where broadcasts and podcasts may not reach. We are still $120 behind our base goal for this. So, if you have some extra dough you can send our way, it’d be much appreciated. We won’t paywall our content ever, but for those who donate at our patreon above the $10 level, you’ll get a monthly zine in the mail sent to you or a prisoners of your choosing in the US as curated by us, plus some one-time gifts.
Other ways to support the project include sending us show ideas, giving us feedback, sharing us with your friends and enemies, or talking your local radio station into playing us on the airwaves! Get in touch with more questions…
Announcements
Fidencio Aldama
From the Fidencio Aldama Support Fund:
We’re raising funds for Fidencio Aldama, an indigenous Yaqui prisoner framed for murder and locked up in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, Mexico, for his participation in a struggle against a gas pipeline. Fidencio has been in prison since October 2016, was railroaded through the courts, and is currently appealing his conviction. Support will be ongoing, but right now we need funds to get a copy of the case file, help pay for communication, and potentially cover some legal fees.
You can donate here: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/fidenciolibre, or get in touch at fidenciolibre@protonmail.com
A website with more info will be forthcoming, but for now you can read more about Fidencio’s case here:
https://itsgoingdown.org/free-fidencio-aldama-political-prisoner-yaqui-tribe/
Saludos solidarios,
Fidencio Aldama Support Fund
Political Prisoner Updates
Xinachtli, aka Alvaro Luna Hernandez, is an anarchist communist Chicano political prisoner in so-called Texas. His supporters have put together a new website for him that can be found at FreeAlvaro.Net. He’s got a bid for parole coming up this year and could use letters of support! Please check for updates on other prisoners and how to support them in the monthly Prison Break column on ItsGoingDown.
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Featured track:
“Let Me Be The One You Need” (instrumental) by Bill Withers from Managerie – Remastered
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Transcription of Spencer Sunshine interview
The Final Straw Radio: Would you please introduce yourself with your name preferred pronouns and any affiliation that are relevant to this conversation?
Spencer Sunshine: My name is Spencer Sunshine, he/him and I have researched, written about, and counter-organized against the far right for about 15 years.
TFSR: So we’re speaking in the days after January 20 2021 and I’m hoping that Spencer, who’s made a name for reporting on far right ideas and organizing from an antifascist perspective, could help break down some, a bit, of what appears to be going on the last two weeks in the US. The mainstream media has been filled with the squishy sound of liberal hand wringing over the broken windows at the US Capitol. As larger portions of the political and economic establishment have chosen to distance themselves from Trump’s claims at the election was stolen, the media has reported on the far right street movements that have been violently engaging not only portions of the population they consider enemies, such as the Movement for Black Lives, or solidarity with immigrants movements, or antifascist and leftist more widely, but increasingly, they’ve also been engaging physically with law enforcement. Can you talk a bit about the framing that the mainstream media and the Democrat Party have been using as a rush to apply terms, like insurrectionaries or terrorists, to what took place on January sixth?
SS: It’s a sort of good and bad thing. They’ve used a lot of language that perhaps doesn’t reflect what I think went on on the sixth, you know, as you said, they’ve used “terrorists”, it’s a “coup”, “attempted coup”, “insurrection”, you know, talking about the “domestic terrorism”, talked about the need to have new laws about domestic terrorism. You know, along with some good things, like a recognition that it’s a violent, antidemocratic movement based on lies, right, or conspiracy theories and propaganda. So there’s good and bad things about how they’ve talked about them. Unfortunately, the worst thing is the way they’re talking about them can easily be applied to the left to and that’s the real, that’s one of the real dangers at the moment.
TFSR: One element that surprised some of the folks and is the swath of groups with competing ideologies that shared space and took action, which, some of which appear to be coordinating. Like, I’ve heard reports in the media that Proud Boys are being accused of having used radios to coordinate certain specific stochastic activities at the Capitol. Kathleen Beleuw, who’s the author of Bring the War Home, has talked about what happened on the sixth, less as an unsuccessful coup attempt, but more as an inspirational flexing by the autonomous fire right, of their Overton window, a la the Early Acts in The Turner Diaries. Is this a helpful landmark, and can you talk about some of the tendencies and groups that are known to have engaged in a coordinated manner around the capital push?
SS: Well, with all due respect, I disagree with Kathleen Belew, as I do on many points with her, I believe this is more a crime of opportunity. And in a sense, the left would have done the same thing if there was a big angry demonstration of 5,000 people and they thought it might be able to storm the Capitol, you know, I could see that happening. Of course, I could be wrong and maybe she’s right, but I think this is a high point for them. It’s true that it was a bunch of disparate groups, but these disparate groups have been acting together under the same banner for quite a while, like really, for the last four years. And at some point, the white nationalists are in or out of it. And there were some white nationalists there, you know, the Groyper’s in particular, but not that many. There were organized groups, I mean, we will find out more, and there’s a lot of wild talk and speculation, and I’m hesitant about a lot of this stuff. So you know, we’ll find out more, how many people were acting in a coordinated fashion, and what they were. Some Oath Keepers were just charged with this. I had no doubt that the Proud Boys were, they have a long, long time street experience and know how to act together as a group. It’s unclear how the actual storming, how many of these people were important in it, and the groups of people driving deep into the Capitol, you know, most people have seen that scene where they’re like, trying to slam the door on a cop and the police are really not sure if they can hold the line against them, like how many organized actors were involved in that?
I think we have to admit that most of the people who went in were not prepared to do this, and were not in organized groups, I think that that’s pretty clear. I don’t think it’s unusual that they’re acting under the same banner, I think the important thing is largely this has been a more moderate group of people, the street actions, the militant street actions have tended towards the more ideological extreme groups, you know, Charlottesville was fascists, and then it’s been largely Proud Boys and to some extent, Patriot Prayer, and now this action, which is you know, an attack on liberal democracy, whatever we think of that, that’s what it is, was done by more moderate political forces. And that’s a really terrible sign. But again, I think it was really a high point for them, they were able to do it because of not their militancy, but a security failure on the part of the Capitol police. Which again, we will find out how much, or to what extent that was intentional, by higher up’s who decided not to put more than the regular police defending the Capitol. It obviously wasn’t true of most of the people on the ground, I mean, one cop was murdered, and the others were clearly engaged in pretty fierce fighting, even though a handful may have, you know, helped facilitate this. So my reading of what happened: I think it’s wrong to call it a coup or an insurrection. If it was an attempted coup, Trump had his chance, they succeeded, right. He could have declared the dictatorship then and should have, and he certainly did not. So I mean, I consider it a takeover or an attack, but mostly a crime of opportunity.
TFSR: I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about, like the off duty law enforcement military that participated alongside of civilian Trumpers, and with uniformed police, in some instances, allowing protesters to pass through blockades. Does this, I mean, this has been a long time policy as long back as the Klan’s existed they’ve had affiliations with the police. And I know that back in the 60’s and 70’s, and 80’s, there’s been a push to get more active white supremacists in law enforcement agencies. Does this give a glimpse into a shift in the success of the far right organizing in those institutions? Or is it just kind of more of the same and something that was actually advertised beforehand from the you know, from the Oval Office?
SS: It’s a little hard to say. So first off, the security forces being involved in far right movements is something that happens globally, it’s not special to the US. There’s a huge problem of this in Germany right now. It’s true, there’s been a lot of attempts at recruiting by far right groups, current and former police and military. I think for real, full on white nationalists, they’ve drawn some. I think a lot more have been drawn to the Trumpist movement, and because this was more politically moderate, I would expect more cops and soldiers. Some of these people who are being reported as being arrested are retired, though, I think about half…maybe I shouldn’t say [that], but a number of them that are being reported aren’t current. And if you’re retired, you are in a different position to take part in, you know, further right political activity. And this is pretty common as people leave security forces to move further to the right, or publicly expressed for the right political views maybe that they had before.
It’s always a problem of the alignment between far right forces, and especially lower level police. That’s not new. I don’t know how many really are in these groups. I think the numbers are wildly exaggerated by the groups themselves. Like, the Oath Keepers say that, you know, are specifically oriented towards recruiting current and former police, military and first-responders, but I kind of doubt that they have very many active people from these backgrounds, you know, who are currently serving, who are members of the organization. You can join that organization if you’re just an everyday person, it’s largely a paper tiger. So I’m a little dubious about the claims of how many people are involved or what percentage of police and military are in these groups? I think the opposite is true. There’s a larger percentage of police and military in various far right groups. Clearly, it’s of some substantial-ness because they said a quarter of people arrested are military. This may be a bit of a side effect of who’s been arrested, though, and not the whole demonstration.
I think it’s pretty clear that police and military, it is a speculation, but that they’re more willing to engage in aggressive actions, they’re more trained to do that, and they’re inculcated, military particularly, are inculcated within ideology that it’s appropriate to use violence in the form of political aims, no matter what those aims are, right? I mean, that’s what they’re doing in the military. They’re using violence to forward the US political aims, but they carried that idea over into private life, too.
TFSR: So since the sixth of January, you know, I’ll quit harping on that day, pretty soon, there’s been a lot of chatter about the far right getting doxxed by antifa, as the state was building its cases against participants in that push. Do you know if there have been any antifascist researchers that have been actively feeding information to authorities, or if it’s just the government doing its own work and Hoovering up whatever OSINT from the public happens to be out? Like, DDOSecrets, for instance, has been hosting that trove of Parler content on Amazon servers and putting it out for free, so that’s up for state or non state actors to engage with. I wonder if you have anything to say if there are, quote-unquote, “antifascist researchers” that are actively feeding information to the state, if you think that’s a good idea or bad idea, or what.
SS: I don’t know of and haven’t heard of people who self identify as part of the current antifascist movement who’ve done that. Now, of course, if people out there local far right activists as being there, they show evidence, it is logical that the authorities would use that intelligence to arrest people. And that puts people in something of a bind, like, do you not, you know, out this information, in order to make sure they don’t get arrested. So I think people have largely decided that they’re going to put that information out there, and people can do with it as they will, which has always been the case with doxxing. Um, I don’t know how good the authorities are at at finding stuff on their own. It seems like people who are are outed first and then arrested. I think what’s interesting is a lot of liberals have decided to suddenly do this work, and they’re doing the bulk, I would guess they’re doing the bulk of the doxxing or outing, and they have no qualms about this and they’re definitely feeding information to the FBI. I would guess what you describe is coming mostly from from them.
TFSR: So as the centrist consolidate power in the national government, and the FBI have been knocking on doors and arresting members of the far right, and also some anti fascist and Black liberation activists across the country. For instance, one of the bigwigs in the New African Black Panther Party was visited by FBI in New Jersey recently, and a former YPG volunteer who does community defense work in Tallahassee, Florida was arrested after posting on social media that people should go and oppose any far right armed presence on the 20th. But Biden’s denunciation of anarchists throughout the uprising rings in my ears, does this signal Democrats engaging more actively in a three way fight? And what do you think that that will mean for those of us anti-authoritarian left’s? Could this be like, a way to Trojan-horse in a domestic terrorism claim against antifascists that Trump wasn’t able to get through, alongside of the building up, or ramping up of like, quote-unquote, “Black identity extremist” pushes that his administration was making?
SS: I don’t think the way that Trump addressed the antifa movement is going to be carried on by the Biden administration. I mean, a lot of things Trump said just didn’t make any sense, like the domestic terrorism designation, because there isn’t one. It’s true right now that they’re trying to introduce new laws about domestic terrorism, which is ridiculous, even from a liberal perspective, because there’s plenty of laws on the books to do that, as we’ve seen over and over again, used against the left. It’s clear that any crackdown on quote-unquote, “domestic terrorism” is going to at least peripherally affect the left. There’s many reasons for this: Biden really wants to reach across the aisle to the Republicans, and he’s going to want to throw them at least a little bit of raw meat, so they’ll make some arrests, even if the pales in comparison to the far right. Also, once FBI agents, this is a real problem they get when they make busts and convictions, it’s good for their career, and as they run out of far right activists, they’ll want to find more terrorists, and if they can’t do that, produce more terrorists. And that will ultimately turn their attention to the left and Black liberation movements and such.
I don’t know I kind of expect Biden to talk left and walk right about these issues, I think he’ll give lip service to Black Lives Matter. I think they’ll continue to be arrests, especially as you know, if conflicts continue to go on, if there continued to be, you know, military demonstrations in cities after the cops kill more Black folks, as they will. I don’t expect a big crackdown on the antifa movement, especially now, as the antifa movement has sort of gone in a seesaw motion about whether it’s popular with liberal liberals or not, like four or five times, and it’s “in” right now. And unless something really dramatic happens, I think it’s going to kind of stay that way, that after the capital takeover, liberals and centrists sort of have understood in some way that something should have been done about the street forces. And the antifa movement is the only thing to inherit the mantle of having done something about them. So I don’t expect it, I hope not, it is possible. I think there definitely will be some people thrown under the bus just to make an appearance of the both sides-ism by the federal government, though.
TFSR: I guess to correct the question that I asked, because I totally failed to recognize the fact that it was Muslims and people from Muslim majority countries that were the main target following 911, of a lot of anti-terrorism legislation, and a lot of the enforcement was focused on entrapping people in immigrant communities and of the Muslim faith into quote-unquote “terrorism charges”, even if there was, you know, a manufacturing of the situation.
SS: Yeah, sure how much of that is gonna continue? I’m not sure how much of that has happened in the last few years even. But I believe that these techniques of entrapment will continue on for whoever. And it is possible if the whole terrorism thing, you know, domestic terrorism thing amps up that they’ll turn their attention back to the Muslim community. There’s enough of an industry built around that, that they can use that base, and they can always come up with some more people to entrap.
TFSR: So we were promised on January 20, that we would see a day of massive right wing protests at state capitals around the country as well as in DC. Obviously, DC was totally locked down and militarized pretty tightly. What do you think contributed to the relative quiet of the days since the sixth? Was it the drumbeat of the media, the chilling effects of federal arrests, the shutting down of Parler and silencing of other social media, the far right or Trump making his way out of office or conceding as much as he did? And what do you think it says about the future of the movement that he really helped to galvanize and whip into fervor?
SS: Well, I think Trump conceding really deflated them, right? They were inflated by this idea that he was gonna fight to the bitter end or on, and Q-Anon even had this, their last ditch theory was all those military, the National Guard was in DC, because Trump was finally going to arrest the satanist, pedophiles, and that was what the military was actually there for. But I think in general, his concession deflated them, I think the massive turning of public opinion against them, including by non-Trumpist republicans really chastise them. And they realized that was a bad move, that was really bad PR to do that. And to repeat that on a state level, you know, in state capitals was only going to further de-legitimize them. I think, you know, as I said before, their success was a failure of the security forces, and I think statewide, once the government decides it’s not going to allow militant political action, they can control that situation. And that was definitely what was going to happen, you know, in various state capitals.
I don’t know how much the move towards other platforms really motivated that you can always get the word out. So that I don’t think was an important factor. I think people are biding their time, biding, ha ha, their time about what the next move is, but I think their movement’s going to shatter. It’s going to, well, not necessarily shatter, but it’s going to have a bunch of schisms, there’s going to be a fight for the soul of the Republican Party, and the non-Trumpists are going to try to take it back. And they’re going to be on good ground to say “Trump lost and so you don’t have the popular ideology”. And then, of course, some people are going to, you know, move out of the movement towards a more radical position and a more anti-current, some people say an “anti-state”, I think this is the wrong thing, anti-current US government position and anti-police position, and we will see more brawls with police, and more turning against even the moderate Republicans then is already there. So there’ll be a splinter amongst the Trumpist street forces that way, between the Back the Blue people and those becoming more and more radical. And the way that Neo-Nazis, long ago, decided to, sort of, move back towards the center about this, but you know, in the 80’s, decided that they were going to take a revolutionary position, and the police and the federal government were their enemies.
TFSR: Kind of on that line, I was wondering, so in the last couple years we’ve seen the dissolution of, the disappearance to some degree, of visibility, at least around groups like RAM or The Base, or Atomwaffen Division. And I’m sure that like, there definitely were some arrests, but I’m sure not everyone just gave up on the ideology. Where do you think that those folks are putting their energy now, do you have any speculation on that?
SS: That’s a good question. You know, by 2018, the fascist groups involved in the alt right, pretty much collapsed. You know, as Richard Spencer’s speaking tour got shut down and Traditionalist Worker Party fell apart in the Night of the Wrong Wives, that was really kind of the end of that being such a big and growing movement. And then the feds decided to smash Atomwaffen and The Base after the El Paso massacre, they finally were like, alright, well, this is a problem. And when they want to disrupt a network, they can really do it. So they have arrested most of those people and that’s put the more radical, well “militant” is the wrong word, the pro-terrorism, part of the Neo-Nazi and related milieu, has scattered it, has shattered it, really.
The biggest group now, this was something that a lot of people overlooked, but American Identity Movement dissolved the day before the election, who were one of the two big remaining white nationalists, you know, fascist groups. And they seem to have entered the Groyper movement, which is the real living part that’s come out of the white nationalists — well almost white nationalists because I believe they do allow in people of color, but run by white nationalists, part of the remaining part of the alt right — and they have done an entryist move to try to move the Trumpist base to the right. And they were, of course, present on the sixth, they had flags, they were present as a bloc. So that’s the main thrust of things. I think people maybe who were involved in 2016, 2018, I think a lot of them have probably given up being politically active. New people, especially tend to cycle through activists who are really active, you know, often cycle through an 18 months, a year. James Mason actually calls it the 18 Months Syndrome, which I like. And there’s a similar thing on the left, where a lot of people get involved in these mass movements, and then burn out pretty quickly, although some of them will remain. But I don’t know, it is actually a good question of where a lot of these people went. I mean, the people who run groups that help ex-white nationalists leave have said there’s more and more people coming to them, and coming through them. So it’s clear a chunk of people have been leaving the movement for the last couple years.
TFSR: Well that’s good news. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the Groyper movement? I know Nick Fuentes is the name that comes up frequently with that, but so they identify ideologically as fascist and are entryists into the Republican Party. Is that a fair description?
SS: I don’t know whether they identify as fascist or not. I mean, they’re definitely trying to downplay that. I mean, I think they are, and they originally were trying to enter the Republican Party very openly, and take positions and local GOPs. I think more they’re trying to influence the base more at this point. But it’s not a movement I’ve watched real closely either, to be honest. So I mean, they haven’t been at the forefront of anything, but they’re sort of simmering in the background, but I think they’re in one of the better positions moving forward. They haven’t disbanded. They’re not organizing independently as white nationalists. There’s a question of: do you organize independently as an independent political movement or as an adjunct, and somehow part of a bigger movement, and they’ve picked that strategy. And it seems like a successful strategy as all the other groups have collapsed, except Patriot Front, who are digging down into their sectarianism and their events are decreasing in size.
So I don’t know they’re, I think they’re in a good position, they’re in the best position of the white nationalist style groups. And I think going forward the militias are also going to be in a good position, they can easily pivot towards being anti-federal government, which are their traditional talking points. I was actually kind of surprised they were able to keep up their movement as much as they did under Trump.
TFSR: Yeah, I guess the idea of centralizing your authority, like, it seems like there’s a lot of strains, and I’m gonna forget the names of these specific divisions within a lot of the militia movements, but that sort of align with the idea of a strong Sheriff or like some sort of like constitutional sovereign, Dominionist, I guess, is a term that falls in there. And it seems like having a strong central authority that, to some degree is viewed as imposing, even as much as he didn’t, imposing like Christian values could sort of, like a lot of people were internalizing this idea of Trump as their strong leader, as a representative of America and of masculinity and all these things, so even if he was in the central government, he wasn’t viewed as being of the federal government. SS: Yeah I mean, I think that’s how they viewed him. He was a sort of singular figure and because he was fighting, quote-unquote “the swamp” they could say that was the federal government that they were opposed to. I agree that their basic themes were all reflected in Trump. The there’s an interesting history to this, that backs that perspective up, is a lot of the original militia movement comes out of a white supremacist group called Posse Comitatus, that was founded in 1971. And there was a split amongst white nationalist after the collapse of the segregationist movement by the civil rights movement, and the new laws by the federal government supporting civil rights.
Basically, one wing — and this actually happened specifically in a Christian identity church, a white supremacist church, run by a pastor named Swift — moved towards Neo-Nazism. And the thing with the Nazis is that they want a big government, you know, with total power and an economy that they alter in some ways, they want some control over the economy. And so Richard Butler took over Swift’s church and moved to Hayden Lake and established his compound and move towards Neo-Nazism. Another person in this church, William Gale founded Posse Comitatus, which, you know, became the basis of the militia movement. Instead of wanting more centralization after the failure of the segregationist movement, and wanting to take the government over — or take a government over, establish a new government — he moved in the other direction. And he said, Well, states rights failed, but what we need then is essentially kind of county rights, we need more decentralization, because then we can resist the federal government this way. It’s the same themes as you pointed out, it’s the same themes that are being pursued in two different tactical directions. The militias, I thought they did a very clever thing: all their talking points should have led them to oppose Trump, and they did a very clever move to somehow convince their base that they should actually support all the talking points that they, you know, all the things that they’ve opposed all these years. But I mean, it just shows us that what’s driving them is not a true desire for decentralization, but it’s merely a tactical way to achieve these reactionary goals.
TFSR: Localized, patriarchal, like authoritarianism, sort of.
SS: Yeah, pretty much pretty much.
TFSR: In a recent story in The Guardian, people monitoring the far right Q-Anon conspiracy movement speculated that the vanishing of Q Drops and a loss of faith in the community may lead to a large repelling of former followers. Would you talk a little bit about, because we haven’t really talked about Q-Anon on the show, and I’m sure that listeners have heard tons about it and maybe been doing their own research, there’s lots of podcasts about it. But would you talk about the antisemitic roots of conspiracy theories like Q-Anon, and efforts by white nationalist movements to draw them in?
SS: Yeah, I think they’re being black pilled. They’re already red pilled, right, because that’s like Trumpists. So now there is a real fear a lot of them will move further into sort of fascist circles. And and some of them will, I mean, I’m hesitant to say the majority of them will, but even if a few do that can be a significant gain for fascists in the United States. Most conspiracy theories have a relationship to antisemitism, either they’re sort of washed out de-anti-Semitized versions of conspiracy theories, where they emerge from them, keep the same structure, so often keep the same targets but sort of remove being explicit that they’re being targeted because they’re Jewish. Soros is a great example of this, right? Where as it’s become more popular, it’s not, it’s become unspecific that he’s Jewish. And people will even say, Well, that doesn’t matter. But the whole conspiracy theory was a traditional antisemitic conspiracy theory, and it was specified that he was Jewish and that’s why he was being targeted.
And once you get into these conspiracy circles, they move around. I always see it as a shell game, so you have three shells, and one of them is antisemitism, one is a sort of washed out antisemitism, and one of them is just something else. And the you know, the coin or whatever, the shells are constantly moving around, you have to guess which one it’s underneath. And so as people get in these discussion circles, there’s all kinds of cross pollination, and part of that cross pollination will be antisemitism, because that has created so many of the conspiracies, so many conspiracy theories originated as antisemitic conspiracy theories.
This idea of the global one where a government became the New World Order was antisemitic, all the stuff about the Federal Reserve, that was formed as an antisemitic conspiracy theory, Cultural Marxism, Soros, the list goes on and on. And once you get into conspiracy theories, it’s a narrative. It’s actually a pretty standardized narrative that’s been around a couple hundred years. And once you believe in that narrative, which is a fact free narrative, nothing stops you from moving into bigoted territory, right? You’ve already become dis-attached from facts and reality, you’re already playing around in a fantasy world and often switching around who’s the agent of a conspiracy.
So at some point, you know, the Jews, or specific Jews will become the target of the conspiracy theory. And you’re not epistemologically grounded, you’re not grounded in your sense of what you accept, to resist this anymore. Not for most people. Occasionally for Jews, people will draw a line, and a few other people, at the Jews being named, but, you know, sometimes you may get Jewish people who embrace these conspiracy theories, so.
TFSR: I guess I’m a separate, separate and final note, Matthew Heimbach has been repackaging himself as a former white nationalist. I didn’t know if you had any thoughts about his instance, in particular, but I’d be curious on your thoughts of how we as an antifascist movement can assess supposed turns from white nationalism and people who are drawn to the limelight, and what time maybe should pass, and what reparations would look like to prove that someone has actually moved away in more than just words from the activities. Do you have perspectives on when it makes sense to judge that someone has left the far right and can be listened to for useful perspectives?
SS: Yeah, I do. I’ve spent a long time talking to formers and I sort of helped someone who had already left the movement, he had just left, navigate this process over a year or two. I think it takes people a couple of years. A lot of this problem has been introduced by a group called Light Upon Light that’s run by a quote-unquote, “former Islamist” who attracted a bunch of quote-unquote, “former Nazis”. The problem is the group has allowed people to keep what are more moderate, far right views: Islamophobic views, anti-antifa views. And normally, formers or groups of formers, make people go through a process, make them make amends, and expect them to embrace some sort of equality for all, right? At the very least. Not to become left wingers, but embrace civil rights and equality for all as part of the repudiation. And Light Upon Light did not do that.
Jeff Shoep, who came out of the National Socialist Movement, almost overnight, became a former who was speaking out, and while I do believe he in particular, has honestly left white nationalism, I don’t think he’s gone through this process. And then his friend Heimbach, you know, again, suddenly, in a matter of months, declared himself a former white nationalist, and he, I don’t believe at all by his statements has left it in his heart. And now he’s left Light Upon Light and move back further to the right. And I just, I just don’t believe that he has, I think people should take a couple years and go through a process. They need to confront why they were attracted to this movement, they need to publicly talk about the damage they did, and they need to make amends. And, you know, I think this is not an instant process, and anyone who does this in six months or even a year, I wouldn’t necessarily trust.
Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t trust that they’ve left the movement and a sense of detaching themselves from those networks and stuff. I just don’t believe they’ve gone through this process. If you’re talking about when should we take their opinions seriously, I think they need to sit down with it. And all the former’s will say this, everyone I’ve talked to, or maybe the Light Upon Light people don’t, but like, they need to sit down and have a real internal dialogue about what it was that attracted them to this movement, and how it is that they’ve moved past these ideas, and if they have. It needs to be a real reckoning with themselves. So people who come out and immediately try to posit themselves, especially as very public formers, you know, I don’t buy it,
TFSR: I think also like, and again, as you say, it’s like not, it’s not to be expected that someone’s gonna move from, you know, from a far right, white nationalist, Neo-Nazi perspective, into an anti fascist or leftist perspective, or whatever. And maybe that’s not to be expected, and that’s fine. But like, Heimbach in particular is an individual who has been trying to hold and build a space that would like draw this third position. And so he’s already had a long time working through ideas of how do I appeal to the people on the left? How do I use language that will appeal to people who are left of center? How do I draw on narratives of identity politics and equality? You’re like a quote-unquote “right wing multiculturalism”, you could almost say, so, you know, that’s not to say that he couldn’t change. But he seems like someone who especially particularly has a prevalence towards being able to being comfortable using language in a way to manipulate people towards an argument that they wouldn’t think necessarily of adopting in the first place. I guess anyone that’s an organizer is going to try to do this sort of thing. But for me, in particular, I look at him and I look at his closest to like National Bolshevism or other projects like that, and it makes me think, like, I want to see for sure that he is doing this other work before I necessarily believe that comes out of his mouth.
SS: Yeah, no, I think the Third Positionists are in a better position to do that, because they tend publicly not to denigrate people of color. That was always his shtick in Traditionalist Worker Party, and tend to say that they want to stand up for the interests of the working class, and they’re interested in environmentalism, and it’s pretty easy to move that and claim it’s just not a racist perspective anymore. And you know, he doesn’t seem to have changed his tune very much. You know, it sounds like stuff he said in TWP. And he certainly hasn’t said what was wrong with TWP, and he hasn’t made any amends, people have to make amends. I believe they do. And he just hasn’t gone through any process. So there’s no reason to believe him.
This is gonna continue to be a problem where people like him say they’re leaving, but don’t seem to be leaving at all. I mean, they may leave the networks, and that does mean something, you know, that does mean something. But that doesn’t mean, I’d rather that they not, I don’t want these people really to join the left, not for a few years. We’re not going to gain that many of them. I think after a few years, and after going through this process, they can, but we’re probably going to have more and more people do that, like leave the networks, but still, you know, still talk far right still have more moderate far right views?
TFSR: Well, I was hoping that you could maybe tell us a bit about where people can find your writing, the publications that you’ve put out. For instance, 40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists? Where can people find your stuff? And how can they support you on Patreon?
SS: So 40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists is a guide I did with PopMob, the Popular Mobilization group in Portland, Oregon, that’s helped, bring people to the demonstrations out there. It does what it says on the tin, it offers 40 things that are legal, actions you can take to combat a fascist in the violent far right, a lot of options in there for people who can’t get out on the streets for whatever reason, if they’re, you know, physically disabled, or they have to take care of their families, or they’re elderly or whichever they are, that’s available for free on my website, it’s spencersunshine.com/fortyways, there’s printable PDFs there. I encourage people to print them out themselves and distribute them in their area.
My other writings are all available on my website spencersunshine.com, almost all of them are free. If you want to follow me on Twitter, it’s where I’m most active transform6789, on Facebook and Instagram, if you like funny, anti-far-right memes, follow my Instagram. And of course, I am an independent researcher and writer, I used to work for Think Tank, and I have left them and I don’t have any organizational support. So if you like to throw me a few clams on Patreon, you know, just Spencer Sunshine.
TFSR: That’s awesome. Is there anything else that I didn’t ask about that you want to mention?
SS: Yeah, sure. I think it’s a big Pandora’s Box about what’s going to happen for the next year, I think people need to be very aware and stay active for the next year. And I think the anti fascist movement, and monitors, you know, who don’t identify with that term, it goes up and down in reflection of the growth of the far right. And I think what happened last time, because I caught the big boom of the 80’s and 90’s, and then it went down and then it came back up in 2016-17, during that time almost all the structures collapsed. People need to make a plan and people need to make a commitment for having a longer term structure that stays in place in the way, for example they have in Germany and such, because it takes a while to get moving. And that’s a bad thing, because that means the fascist and other movements will move first, and will have to play catch up. And we want to try to prevent that situation from happening again.
TFSR: And I think that like one thing, when people think about anti-fascism in the US is we don’t necessarily have a positive vision towards it. Like, we maybe think or talk about people confronting in the street or doing the ongoing research, which is very helpful for communities to keep themselves safe, maybe training, but I think that there’s other groups, like for instance, PopMob that you wrote that piece with, that are doing above ground discussions and work around other things, and include anti fascism. So maybe this is also a good time for people to find their own, like positive antifascist projects to engage with.
SS: Yeah I think there needs to be like PopMob does, a lot of open grassroots and legal organizing, also, that can sustain for a longer period of time, that isn’t connected to the militant antifascist stuff. That turns too many people off. And it’s not always the best way to deal with some of these problems. If we want to reach a broader group of people, there needs to be a different kind of organizing, it can’t have the label of everyday antifascist, which is what PopMob uses. Or it could have another label, like I take the position of “it doesn’t matter”, you’re doing you know, it’s almost sometimes called The Work, you’re doing work against the far right or you’re not. So we want to make the work accessible to people.
And that can include really positive things, I think people should do — and I’ve covered some of this and 40 ways — a lot of educational work. This is done in Germany and other places where the antifascist movement is much broader. Like one of the things I like is memorial events where people that have been killed by the far right, or there’s been historic massacres, to sort of keep this on people’s minds in the community about what the stakes of this are. And just that this is a political movement that comes and goes in America. And you know, you can have reading groups or other other things, and understand that this is a movement that’s really part of American life. There’s been fascists, there’s been Nazis in the United States since the 1920’s. We’re, you know, coming up, I think 1922 was the first Nazi, so we’re coming up on 100 years of Nazism in America. And these other far right groups go back, you know, anti-Masonic theories were popular in the 1790’s.
Andrew Jackson’s presidency is often looked at as the first, kind of anti-liberal, far right movement that starts this consistent thing, the Klan starts in the 60’s. So we have to be aware, this is a permanent fixture of American life, and it may have a more moderate form, you know, sort of like Trumpist stuff that’s attached to the right wing of the Republican Party, or may have a more vicious form of Neo-Nazis and rather violence, street movements, and this isn’t going to go away.
People need to learn how to pay attention to this. I think the left lost vision, lost a sense that this was here, from 2000 to 2016, or 17, neo-liberalism became the single enemy on the right. And there became a loss of vision that you know, there could be this other populist far right, that was very vicious too.
TFSR: Thank you so much, Spencer.
SS: Thanks for having me on the show.
. … . ..
Transcription of Interview with IGD & CrimethInc
TFSR: Would you please introduce yourselves as you see fit and whatever projects you affiliate with for the purpose of this chat?
CrimethInc: For the purpose of this conversation, I’m just a participant in CrimethInc Ex workers collective associated project.
ItsGoingDown: I work on ItsGoingDown.org which is a news media platform and podcasts and radio show, along with CrimethInc, The Final Straw, the Channel Zero Anarchist Podcast Network.
TFSR: Since the right wing riot in DC on January 6, many of the larger social media platforms have begun purging accounts affiliated with far right groups and tendencies present at the Capitol and big data has been de-platforming apps like Parler. Can y’all maybe talk about what you’ve seen with this and how you think it bodes for anti-authoritarian projects on the left that challenge the state?
IGD: I‘ll start off. I think one thing to point out is that there’s a narrative that this is, like, de-platforming censorship. I mean, obviously, we can point out that this is coming from private companies, not the state. I mean, the First Amendment is supposed to stop the state from censoring speech, and people’s ideas. It doesn’t have anything to do with private companies. I think which is interesting, because I would argue that there’s probably more evidence to support the fact that the government has put more pressure on private companies to de-platform anarchist, antifascist and people on the left. But I would say the tendency to remove far right groups and figures from platforms though has not come from like, you know, people picketing outside Twitter or sort of this push from below. Which is sort of how the right portrays it. It’s instead come after large scale incidents, things like at the Capitol, or Charlottesville, where these companies basically have freaked out.
If you read the book Antisocial, which is sort of like a history of the alt right online, I mean, literally, as Charlottesville was happening, the people at Reddit, like the people that run the company, were scrambling because they were terrified they were somehow going to be found legally responsible for what was going on. And they were literally purging all these big accounts. So it really has nothing to do with a personal political stance, or like getting pressure. I mean, from what I’ve heard from journalists and other people that have talked to people at Twitter, or have relationships, they’re very aware that certain people on the far right are literally, for years, have violated the terms of service. But yet they’ve made a decision not to ban them because either they have big accounts or they feel if they got rid of them that that would just cause too much of a riff, or a problem.
I think Trump is a really good example: they finally got to the point where they’re like, okay, we know that he’s gonna be on his way out, we can finally make a decision at this point where, you know, we can get rid of him, and we’re not gonna be in this weird political situation. Like we can successfully do that. And it’ll look fine because he’s just messed up so bad. I think like Alex Jones is another good example. They chose to get rid of Alex Jones at a time when he was facing all these lawsuits for the Sandy Hook stuff. So I mean, they made a good decision to take him off, because if they would have allowed him to continue, they might have been held legally responsible.
So I think that we have to remember that these corporations usually are taking these moves to remove stuff because they don’t want to be held legally responsible. I think the other side of the coin is like the stuff that they’re doing around things like Q-Anon or COVID-19 Truther-ism or stuff like that, there is a lot of pressure for them from different forces to get rid of that stuff. So it’s a little bit different. I think, like in that instance, recently, like when ItsGoingDown and CrimethInc was kicked off Facebook, I think that was very much an instance of people that were tied to the Trumpian state putting pressure on Facebook to remove certain pages. And in fact I think it’s very telling, in that instance, the names that Facebook gave the press when they were talking about the stuff that they removed, even though it was much larger than just several accounts. But it was you know, ItsGoingDown, CrimethInc, and the Youth Liberation Front in the Pacific Northwest. It was like they got a like an Andy Ngô dream list of accounts, especially for what was happening at the time, which is, you know, Portland was like the big story. So it made total sense to get rid of that stuff is very strategic move, and it had nothing to do with stopping violence or things in the street or anything like that. I think that there’s very different dynamics at play, in short, going on in terms of like how people on different sides are getting thrown off, just to start off the conversation.
C: Who they ban is an indication of the balance of power in our society, basically, to build off what what you’re saying. They ban people if they think that they could, that their speech on these platforms could contribute to a legal risk, but the legal risks are also determined by the balance of power, what’s viewed as legitimate, and how court cases would be likely to go. You know, they certainly would not have banned Trump from Twitter if Trump had won another term by a majority of votes and controlled everything. They would have been trying to figure out how to make peace with him because he would be the one calling the shots. They were able to ban him on his way out, and Jack Dorsey maintains that he was compelled to ban Trump by employees at Twitter who were pressing him to do so, that may be true, that may be the equivalent of labor organizing, but it certainly would not have happened if Trump had less power.
So that’s one of the things we’re gonna have to talk about, repeatedly in this conversation, is how the line between who is banned and who is not relates to the balance of power and how groups that are already targeted, and that are already marginal, can engage with that. The other thing that I want to speak to regarding the recent bands of Parler, and Donald Trump from social media platforms, is that this is taking place in a context in which the state apparatus, the FBI, the police, and so on, are dramatically refurbishing their image for the Biden years. And this whole sort of liberal centrist discourse that has been sympathetic to criticism of the police or the federal government over the last four years under Trump is shifting to cheer-leading for these things.
This is part of the shift to the right that is taking place across society even as the extreme right is excised from legitimacy. You know, and it’s taking place in the same context that now we see self-professed liberals calling for people from the Trump administration to go to Guantanamo Bay. Just accepting the premise that there should be a Guantanamo Bay when not that long ago, liberals were calling for Guantanamo Bay to be abolished.
So we’re really seeing state censorship, corporate censorship, and all of these things that previously would have only been endorsed by right wing groups become extended now to to become liberal discourses or even left discourses. And the risk is that whatever corporations, or for that matter governments, do to the far right, they will always use that as a cover to do the same thing to what they perceive to be the opposite numbers of those groups on the far left. So, as my friend said it, it’s not a coincidence that in summer when Facebook announced that they were banning Q-Anon militia groups, that they also banned CrimethInc, ItsGoingDown and dozens of other anarchist and antifascist journalists and publishing groups, that they will always take those steps. And so really, what we’re seeing is a re-consolidating of power and legitimacy in a political center that will absolutely go after the very same people who have been struggling against fascists all this time.
IGD: Just to kind of drive that point home real quick: two months ago, the New York Times did a little video on like New York Times opinion (if you go on to YouTube and type in “New York Times opinion Q-Anon” it’ll pop up) but it’s a short 10 minute video about Q-Anon. But like, two thirds of the way through, what they do is they say, like, conspiracy theories aren’t logical and then they use like several examples: they talk about conspiracy theories around the JFK assassination, they bring up something else, and then they say “look at anarchism”.
And it’s funny, because they have this picture of Noam Chomsky that pops up — which, of course, Chomsky has submitted stuff and had stuff run in the New York Times for years, which is I find ironic — but they say “anarchism has always never worked and always imploded whenever it’s been put into practice”. Which anybody that knows the history of anarchism knows that actually not true, that it’s actually a history of states and outside forces and fascists and Stalinists and capitalists destroying anarchist societies and projects. I think that that example in itself is telling because what they were trying to do is they were trying to create a narrative of that, you know, we’re the center, we make sense, you know, we’re based on facts and reason. And then there are these crazy people outside, whether it’s Q-Anon on on the right, or anarchist on the left, you know, and those are the real wackos, and stuff like that.
I think it’s also telling too that we could do a whole thing about Q-Anon and like, you know, the various forces that support it, and have pushed it, whether it’s people, state actors, or even people with deep pockets, and, you know, moneyed interests and stuff like that, as opposed to anarchism, which is this grassroots movement from below that’s existed for, you know, over 100 years. Wherever poor and working and oppressed people have struggled, there’s been anarchist. I mean, obviously, the two are very different, but they’re trying to really draw that line between them. I think that example, just kind of like really solidifies for me, at least, you know, the coming terrain of how the center sees things,
C: Right, you know, in a phrase, “narrow the Overton window”, they’re not saying “get rid of the far right, because they kill people”. They’re, you know, they’re saying, “narrow the Overton window, consolidate the legitimacy of the center and emphasize the legitimacy of the other groups”.
IDG: Yeah, and I think that’s why, going forward, it’s going to be important to push back, in terms of what we’re talking about here, but also in terms of any attempt by the state to enact new “domestic terrorism laws” that really are going to come back on us much more hard than anything on the far right. I mean, the state has more than enough tools to arrest everybody that’s already going online saying “yes, we will commit the crimes today, and here’s my address, and here’s what I plan to do, and here’s my five buddies I’m talking on discord about it with”. I mean, they’re very apt to go after those people if they choose to do so. What they chose to do over the past five years or so, as we’ve seen an ascendancy of social movements, is instead double down and focus on Black Lives Matter, who they’ve labeled “Black Identity Extremists”.
We know that there’s a “Iron Fist program” that the FBI has developed, this has been documented by outlets like the Intercept, which like COINTELPRO, they’ve only described in documents as a program to disrupt the Black liberation movement. We know through Fusion Center documents, like police and FBI and homeland security agents are looking at things like InfoWars as like legitimate sources.
If you look at things like the BlueLeaks, some of the stuff that’s coming out of that is just incredible, like FBI agents believing that antifascists are being paid by Bitcoin through ads on Craigslist to go to protests. I mean, it’s just batshit. But obviously the state has made a decision over the past couple of years to, surprise, surprise, go after autonomous anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-racist movements from below as opposed to looking at the burgeoning far right threat. And now it’s outside their door. Now, it’s actually at the point where it’s starting to disrupt state power. And cause, you know, Democratic senators and house representatives to go into hiding at the Capitol. Now they want to paint it as this big issue where, you know, they’ve been killing us for years and stacking up corpses, but now they want to paint it as an issue that, you know, has to be dealt with.
TFSR: Well, the whole thing was run by a “Mad Dog” Chomsky, as they say, you know, the whole riot at the at the Capitol on the sixth. Well, I mean, kind of pulling back, you’ve both made the point that the experiences that you’ve had around getting pushed off of social media platforms, or fundraising platforms as years before, with subMedia and IGD off of Patreon, has been an effort by private corporations measuring the balance of power, and maybe the proclivities of the people that run those specific platforms in some instances, but oftentimes, worrying about how it’s going to look to their stockholders, and kicking off anti-authoritarian, leftist and anarchist projects from those sites in those platforms. Can you talk about a little bit about what the impact has been on your projects during that and sort of how you dealt with that?
C: Well, we were fortunate in that people responded immediately to the news that we’d been kicked off Facebook, when we were kicked off over the summer. There was actually a groundswell of support, I don’t think that was about our specific projects, CrimethInc, ItsGoingDown, and the other projects that were kicked off, so much as it was a spreading awareness that, rather than banning groups according to what risks they pose, groups are being banned for political reasons. This is a concern that is going to affect more and more people, I think it’s probable that the eventual endpoint of this trajectory is that it will be very difficult to talk about anything except centrist politics on these platforms at all.
So when we were kicked off Facebook, you know, there’s this open letter that 1000’s of people signed supporting us and directing attention to the situation, it didn’t really impact us that much. Even the groups that we know that we’re not kicked off Facebook were negatively impacted by the Facebook algorithms after this, so I think if we had not been kicked off, it would not have been very much different results in the long run. We’re still seeing the same amounts of traffic to our website, maybe we’d be seeing more if we hadn’t been kicked off?
I think it’s really an issue of what is legitimized, if they make it seem socially acceptable to ban people on the basis of their anarchist beliefs, from being able to communicate on these platforms, that is a step towards being able to legitimize other measures targeting people. And certainly when it happened, we were concerned because we’re like, well, you know, if you’re going to raid a village, first you cut off the electricity to that village, and diminishing our ability to communicate about what’s happening to anarchists and other activists against white supremacy and government state oppression is one of the steps that you’d have to take to be able to increase the ways that people are targeted. And when we talk about the push now to invest more resources in the state, those resources are being put directly in the hands of the same sort of people who did the capital building occupations, so we can be sure that there’s going to be more repression in the future.
But we’ve been fortunate in the dying days of the Trump administration, there was not the political will to carry that out. It’s possible that there still will not be, but we will have to do a lot of organizing, that doesn’t depend on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, to be able to maintain the ties with people necessary to weather the kind of repression that we can expect to see under the Biden administration.
IDG: Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, the thing with Patreon was so funny, because originally far right, I believe it was Greg Johnson, and that whole kind of crew — which is, interestingly enough, tied to Matt Gates in Florida — but I mean, they have launched a campaign to try to get IGD kicked off of Patreon. And originally, somebody from Patreon responded like, you know, well, actually, we think it’s really important that antifascists have their work supported and stuff like that. To which they were like, Oh, my God, how could they do that? But when Lauren Southern was then kicked off after she was engaged with a group of white nationalists trying to block and putting the lives of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea in danger because they wanted to create clickbait media for you know, Youtube and stuff like that, they were basically forced to do this kind of pound of flesh thing where they had to kick something off. And people like Tim Poole lobbied them to have ItsGoingDown removed.
I think it’s important also to point out that like in the example of Facebook, before they even kicked off, ItsGoingDown and CrimethInc, they really drastically changed the algorithms and the way that pages work. They also made it harder to get certain news sources. I mean, this affected the entire news media industry and anybody creating alternative media was severely impacted. This impacts everybody from Newsweek, down to Democracy Now to us and stuff like that. And that was designed to basically streamline Facebook as a way to generate money, they wanted people to pay to get clicks, basically. Which of course, you know, results in an output, which is that if you have money, you can then pay for more exposure. The end result is something like with the 2016 Trump administration run, where it’s like, they have lots of money, and they can actually pay and flood the internet with lies, and, you know, total fabrications.
You can look at everything that Cambridge Analytica did over the past couple years, in terms of the Trump election campaign. There’s a great documentary on Netflix called the Social Dilemma that’s about social media and the way the algorithms work. But the point is they’ve been slowly kind of pushing off independent, anti-capitalist left wing voices from the platform, since like, 2017, since Trump came into office. I think if you look at the breakdown of the most trafficked sites that basically are on Facebook, like the websites that are news based, that get the most clicks, it’s like The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, Breitbart. It’s like, generally right wing or very far, right Trump-aligned websites.
That’s what basically Facebook has become, it’s become an echo chamber of boomers, talking about Syrian refugees coming to kill them and kick their puppies and stuff like that. And it’s no surprise then that when the pandemic hit, you saw literally like, hundreds and hundreds percent increase in Q-Anon and COVID conspiracies and stuff like that. I think it’s telling again, with the ban of the certain antifascist and anarchist accounts, they literally had to go back and create new rules to kick them off. They were like, well it doesn’t have to necessarily support violence in the speech, but it can kind of allude to it, or the people that are reading it can support it in the comments or something. It’s so vague that literally anything they could potentially kick off.
But of course, it’s just like when police passed a new law against dumpster diving, or like, people smoking outside, or, you know, the homeless people on a bench or something like that. I mean, it’s not necessarily that they’re gonna enforce it all the time, but that gives the police that tool to selectively enforce it, you know, whenever they want to. So it’s a, you know, an invasive instrument, which they can use to attack people whenever they want to. It’s been building I mean, the commons of the internet, if you will, has been becoming more and more policed, and obviously, ideas that attack the status quo, especially that are critical of the state, critical of white supremacy critical of capital they’ve been going after.
TFSR: So it makes me wonder, like, why do, I mean and our project does to some degree engage with social media, and tries to spread our message through it. I fucking hate it personally. But considering all of the downsides to working with social media, considering that there are all these algorithms that you have to constantly try to figure out how to work around, considering getting de-platformed all the time, considering the fact that so many of these social media platforms frequently hand over information or allow backdoors into law enforcement to surveil “extremists”, quote-unquote, in whatever shade you find them, whether it be the far right, or anarchists or autonomists or what have you. How do you all fall on the line of: are we promoting continued use of these platforms by engaging in them? How much are we giving clickbait to law enforcement, who follows who clicks on what? And how much are we actually reaching new audiences? Or are we drawing audiences away from these platforms while still engaging with it?
C: So as we’re talking with people from subMedia about this — because they were proposing that we should organize a campaign to have anarchists withdraw from Facebook, for example — coming out of those conversations, I spoke with some comrades overseas. You know, in some parts of the world, anarchist projects still rely chiefly on Facebook. The occupied social center, Rog, that was just evicted today in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the statement about the eviction is on Facebook, that’s where you have to go if you want to see it. And I said, if we were to make a concerted push to have anarchists withdraw from at least the most compromised social media platforms that involve the most surveillance, how do we do that in a way that doesn’t mean that we lose contact with groups like yours that depended on Facebook chiefly. And they made the reasonable argument the anarchists in their community already are in touch with each other, already communicate with each other through platforms like Signal. But the thing is that they have to be in touch with people outside of their community in order to have the reach that they need to be able to put into effect their ambitious projects to actually change society. And that’s why people maintain presences for radical projects on social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, despite all the compromises.
For us, as anarchists, I think the challenge is always to be in this world, but not of it, to take action in a social context when the terrain itself is against us. As anarchists we’re always fighting not only our adversaries, but against the terrain itself, we’re trying to transform it into something that fosters horizontality, even as it surveils us, even as it rewards those who have the money to buy the kind of media exposure that they need, even as it structures the distribution of information according to existing power disparities. So I think you should never use a tool for the purposes it was designed for in a capitalist society, but at the same time, I don’t think that that always means that the best thing is for us to just refuse unilaterally to use these tools, because for good or for ill, human discourse has largely been fitted to these structures now and the question is more how to subvert them than how to refuse them entirely. I think that we should evaluate the effectiveness of our interventions on corporate social media platforms, according to how efficiently they move people from those platforms to more secure and more reliable formats for engagement. Does your tweet just result in 1000 likes? Or does it actually compel people to form affinity groups and reading groups and to do in person organizing? These are the sort of questions we need to be asking.
The process of determining who will be banned from social media is also the process of establishing what the social consensus will be. I mentioned earlier that it’s determined by the existing balance of power. But it’s not just the result of pre-existing conditions, it also gives rise to conditions. And when it comes to this process of establishing social consensus, what isn’t and is not acceptable, we have to be in that conversation. You know, and actually, we made a lot of progress over the last couple years in helping to shape widespread notions of what is legitimate and what is illegitimate, you know, many people now are critical of police, are open to the idea that the entire justice system or the state apparatus, the capitalist system needs to be deconstructed, that our society needs to be reorganized. And we have to establish access to all of these people to be able to have the conversations that need to unfold. We just should never trust that the platforms that we’re using, the ones that we didn’t build, we should never trust that they will do the work for us or that they exist to fulfill our goals.
IGD: Yeah, I mean, I think the question that you’re asking is a big one. And I think we should be definitely talking about it. I think that, you know, there are alternatives being built. You know, right now, there are servers that are on Mastodon that are creating basically an alternative to Twitter. Right now ItsGoingDown has like, I think, coming up on almost 5,000 followers, which is pretty good, considering you know, that project hasn’t really been promoted that much and it’s been slowly building. But there’s a growing community of people. They’re not only building kind of alternative social media infrastructure, but joining and following being part of the discussion.
What have we gained from like being on social media? I mean, the fact that, for instance, the Washington Post is quoting various Youth Liberation Front collectives across the country about certain things happening, or quoting various tweets from ItsGoingDown. I think what’s happened is that as anarchists have become part of the story, our voices then have been harder to basically remove from the conversation. And the fact that it’s out there and people are looking at it, that means that they can’t just brush it aside and say we don’t exist, we don’t have something to say. On the other hand, that means that as soon as those voices are gone, or they’re taken off, or they’re taken away, or even if a corporation can come in and say, “Oh, these people were naughty, and they said bad things, and they’re promoting violence” I mean, we can turn around and quote that and run with that. So I mean, if those voices are taken off, that means that we’re taking away from the conversation, and it’s just as likely that we’ll be quickly forgotten, or people won’t reach out to talk to us.
I think that going to the Biden administration, I mean I would guess that the platform that anarchists have gotten over the past four years is going to get a lot smaller in terms of doing the mass media is going to be willing to talk to anarchists. I think that there’s gonna be some people like journalists, that are anarchists that have developed the following that will continue to write and, you know, continue to get their stuff out there, but I think that it’s probably a good guess that they’re gonna less, and less be willing to reach out and talk to anarchists about what they think about anti-fascism or community organizing or different struggles happening. I mean, then again, we’ll see I mean, who knows what’s going to happen in the coming terrain?
You know, I just think, also, too, we’ve built up a large following in a lot of these projects and hopefully that’s not going to go away. Like ItsGoingDown, I would say that probably right now, we have just as many people, probably more, that listen to our podcasts than maybe go on the website and read the articles. You know, the podcast community, the people that listen to the show is very massive, and like we have a radio presence and stuff like that. But again, like, as the other person brought up, how do we translate that into like real world engagement?
The last big point I’ll make is that I don’t think that just because social media is such a defining element of our daily lives that we just basically have to give up and just say, Okay, this is the terrain in which we talk to people on like, this is it, this is the only way. We should actually really work at going back and remember that we can actually interact with people face to face, like we can actually have a public presence. I think like getting back to being really good at that, and doing that well. And, you know, having posters up, having flyers, tabling regularly outside, producing publications, running physical spaces, I mean, we do all that stuff and we do it pretty well. The fact that we have this network of infrastructure, like imagine if the alt right had the same amount of physical stuff that the anarchist and autonomous movements have, it’d be terrifying! You know, like, in some cities there’s multiple spaces.
The one great thing about social media is that I mean, if you put something out and it goes very far, or if you’re speaking to something that’s happening, you have the opportunity to reach other people in the public that are already involved in the anarchist conversation or projects, stuff like that. So I mean, the exposure to anarchist ideas, over the past four or five years has grown exponentially. And obviously, we want that to continue. But I think we’ve got to plan into that, that we very well may be kicked off a lot of these big platforms. And the way to make sure that that’s not going to stop what we’re doing is to, you know, have the ability to organize our own communities like in the real world.
TFSR: Yeah, I totally agree. And the work that we’re doing online needs to be a first step, or a part of a conversation, that draws more people into those real life engagements, because we’re not gonna find liberation, we may find comrades on the way, but we’re not gonna find liberation through these platforms. And I know both of the projects that the two of you work with are in and of themselves alternative platforms with so many different facets to how they communicate and the range of voices that they contain within them, which I think is really awesome. I’d like to finish up by asking sort of, are there any like interesting discussions that you think or platforms or directions that people could be taking, where they think about how we diversify the way that we get our voice out, as we’ve faced, either silencing through platforms shutting down or shutting us out? Or, for instance, the other day when signal was down for a good long period of time, I think people started exploring other encrypted applications. I know that CrimethInc, for instance, is also recently engaged with an app called Signal Boost, which I think is interesting to use a new tool to create encrypted phone trees. I don’t know if you had any closing thoughts and examples that you want to bring up.
IGD: Yeah, I think Mastodon is great. The downside of course, is that there’s not a huge amount of people that are on it that are outside of you know, the anarchist space. But you know, I’d remind people that like, for instance, on Twitter, we’re probably the largest anarchist presences, I think it’s like 1% of the US population is on Twitter, and it skews more towards celebrities and journalists, politicians and stuff. It’s definitely not an accurate representation of, you know, the proletariat, the United States or something like that. So, again, even these social media platforms are somewhat limiting, and that I think the real work remains to be done on the streets. And if we can build a visible presence there, I mean, it doesn’t matter if they’re going to kick us off of some social media. I mean, obviously, it’ll matter, but we’re still going to have those connections to people where we live, and I think that’s ultimately what’s what’s really important.
But yeah, I would encourage people to check out Mastodon, if you go to itsgoingdown.org, there is a link right on the site where you can go and check out our Mastodon. There’s basically, the way the Mastodon works is, there’s all these different groups that have servers and they all federate together, it’s pretty cool. It’s definitely anarchy in action on the internet.
I would also encourage people to check out the Channel Zero Anarchist Podcast Network, which is growing. We just included the Indigenous Action podcast, and Sima Lee’s Maroon podcast, it’s growing all the time, there’s great shows, there’s just an amazing network of content that’s been produced. It’s just you know, anarchist politics across the board, from a variety of different groups and perspectives, and also just topics that people are talking about, whether it’s people talking about tenant organizing, or stuff that’s going on in the prisons, or anti-fascism or news or theory, there’s a whole breadth of stuff that’s going on, that people are covering.
C: Just to conclude, from our perspective, as an anarchist collective, that’s now more than a quarter of a century old, we proceeded the social media era. You know, when we got started, we’re mailing each other packages of raw materials to make zines, basically, via cut and paste, we were talking to each other from payphones, you know, and the different kinds of media platforms that we’ve had to use to communicate have shifted dramatically since the mid 1990’s. We’ve won battles and lost battles on each of those fronts, but the terrain keeps changing and the struggle continues, you know.
The good news is that the same forces, the same dynamics and tendencies that are driving us off of some of these corporate media platforms are going to erode the relevance of the platforms themselves. Facebook is not going to be the most important communications platform for the generation that is coming of age right now. And we won’t have to reach them on Facebook, we may have to figure out how to make Tiktok videos in which we lip sync to songs in order to get our ideas across. Which is terrifying for people like us, we’re basically boomers, you know, but the struggle continues; we just have to adjust to a new context and knowing that that won’t be the final phase either.
Throughout all of this, as my comrade said, the engagement in the real world, IRL, on the streets ,is going to be one of the most important things. Even if they ban us from every platform, if there are stickers, if there are posters up in public, if there are dramatic actions that speak for themselves, other people are going to report on those and the word will get out there. My hope is that in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people start to feel at ease coming back together again, that there will be a renaissance of embodied in person social life, and that people will want to be around each other at gatherings. And that we will see people forming reading groups, hopefully establishing new info shops, and that over the past year, we’ve gotten to experience the limitations of having our entire social lives take place through zoom, you know, for those who even have computer access. And there will be an eagerness to return to more embodied in person projects and relationships. For me that that is the foundation of the most effective politics, because the ties that you can create there and the things that you can do together are more intimate, more deep rooted and more powerful.
TFSR: It was such a pity that the together space that happened earlier this year and through a lot of the summer couldn’t very easily be followed up with a continuation of that, and like a deepening of relationships with all the people that I met in the streets.
C: Exactly.
TFSR: It was definitely like deadened residence afterwards. I want to echo what you said, like, let’s hope for this year. Let’s make it happen.
C: Yeah, exactly. Let’s make it happen. And this is a good time right now for anarchists and other ambitious creative people who have everyone’s best interests at heart to be brainstorming what kind of projects we could kick off this summer that will draw people together, that will involve being in physical space together. Maybe this is a time when people could get their hands on spaces that could host some of these mutual aid projects that have gotten off the ground, and then we could be watching films or reading zines and discussing them together or whatever the 2021 version of that would be.
TFSR: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. And yeah, I’m so glad to engage in similar projects to you and get to share space and call you a comrade.
C: Yeah, we’re so fortunate. Thank you so much.