Speaker 1: Alzoone Media get ready for anarchy in Atlanta.
Speaker 2: It should be clear to all Americans that we have
Speaker 2: a very serious left wing terror threat in our country.
Speaker 3: State of the art, organized and well funded activists in criminals.
Speaker 4: On April twenty ninth, twenty twenty five, after almost exactly
Speaker 4: four years of protests, sabotage, encampments, and organizing against the
Speaker 4: construction of a state of the art police training facility
Speaker 4: dubbed copp City, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center officially
Speaker 4: opened atop of the South River Forest into Kabba County, Georgia.
Speaker 4: One two three cuts.
Speaker 1: The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is open. A handshake
Speaker 1: between Governor Brian Kemp and are relieved Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.
Speaker 5: Here has not been an easy journey.
Speaker 1: The opening of the one hundred and eighteen million dollar
Speaker 1: complex for police, fire and E nine to one one personnel,
Speaker 1: which includes academic, leadership and simulation centers, came after not months,
Speaker 1: but years of public pushback.
Speaker 4: This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I've
Speaker 4: been covering the combined Defend the Atlanta Forest, Stop cop
Speaker 4: City movement on this show since twenty twenty one. I
Speaker 4: first traveled to Atlanta to report on the ground from
Speaker 4: inside of the protest encampments in spring of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 4: and I moved to Atlanta to continue covering story more
Speaker 4: in depth in twenty twenty three. My coverage has tracked
Speaker 4: the trajectory of the movement as well as my ability
Speaker 4: as a reporter, But this will be my last piece
Speaker 4: on the Stop Cop City movement. Every other reporter mini
Speaker 4: series I've done on Stop Cup City was written while
Speaker 4: the movement was still ongoing and the final outcome had
Speaker 4: yet to be fully determined. Something that set the movement
Speaker 4: in Atlanta apart was the genuine belief that this fight
Speaker 4: was actually winnable, as opposed to the many lofty aspirations
Speaker 4: of other anti police, anarchists or leftist struggles. I believe
Speaker 4: that we will win and cop City will never be built.
Speaker 4: Were common turns of phrase and not just repeated mindlessly
Speaker 4: as a protest chant, but deeply believed. But now, six
Speaker 4: months after the grand opening of Cop City, I want
Speaker 4: to use this distance to offer a look at the
Speaker 4: whole movement, based on interviews and conversations I've had with organizers, anarchists,
Speaker 4: and forest defenders. Analyzing the movements rise and fall and momentum,
Speaker 4: and why Atlanta is the bridge between the twenty twenty
Speaker 4: protests during Trump's first term and the current expansion of
Speaker 4: police surveillance, ice activity an increased state repression against quote
Speaker 4: unquote radical left terrorists. We don't have enough time to
Speaker 4: retread a complete, in depth play by play of the
Speaker 4: movement's history, most of which I've already covered in previous episodes,
Speaker 4: but I will attempt to break down the movement into
Speaker 4: a series of discrete phases. After organizers learned about the
Speaker 4: plans to build cop City in April of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 4: the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest first took form
Speaker 4: with an opening attack phase throughout the entire summer of
Speaker 4: twenty twenty one, with tree spiking and sabotage targeting construction
Speaker 4: equipment on the east side of the forest, which a
Speaker 4: movie studio was planning to develop at the time in
Speaker 4: partnership with local government. To quote from an anonymous Atlanta
Speaker 4: anarchist quote, early stages of the movement were very intentionally
Speaker 4: defined by lots of sabotage and unapologetic militancy, just absolute
Speaker 4: this is what we're doing. This is what we're about.
Speaker 4: This is the goal. If you don't like it, that's cool,
Speaker 4: but then don't be a part of this. That was
Speaker 4: just what we were doinguote. In September twenty twenty one,
Speaker 4: the Atlantic City Council voted to approve the land Lease
Speaker 4: Ordinance authorizing the Atlanta Police Foundation to use hundreds of
Speaker 4: acres of city owned land in the South River Forest
Speaker 4: to build cop City. After this vote, electoral strategy gets
Speaker 4: largely aeshewed, and soon after the next phase fully kicks
Speaker 4: off that fall with the physical occupation of the forest
Speaker 4: and the start of the pressure campaign's targeting subcontractors working
Speaker 4: on the construction project. To again, quote from an anonymous
Speaker 4: Atlanta anarchist quote, persistent encampment, occupation, lots of direct action happening,
Speaker 4: lots of sabotage happening, and the cops just not knowing
Speaker 4: what to do at all. Small incursions would get made,
Speaker 4: but they just had not figured out what to do
Speaker 4: about it yet. There was just kind of like free
Speaker 4: reign unquote. For the first half of this occupation phase,
Speaker 4: the Atlanta Police into cab sheriffs seemed to be stuck
Speaker 4: in a form of paralysis, not knowing how to disrupt
Speaker 4: the forest encampments or prevent equipment sabotage. Meanwhile, the pressure campaign,
Speaker 4: inspired by the tactics of the animal rights group Shack,
Speaker 4: showed early promise in getting some contractors like Reeves A
Speaker 4: Young construction and material suppliers to drop out of the
Speaker 4: cop City project. But after this stream of steady success
Speaker 4: from Fall of twenty twenty one to May of twenty
Speaker 4: twenty two, the police were forced to up the ante
Speaker 4: and started conducting large scale raids in the forest to
Speaker 4: remove force defenders and damage encampment infrastructure. Quoting an Atlanta
Speaker 4: anarchist quote, May of twenty twenty two is the end
Speaker 4: of the paralysis phase for the cops. We had our
Speaker 4: first grid sweep raids where the paralysis phase is broken.
Speaker 4: You're getting your multi agency large sweeps where they're really
Speaker 4: coming in and putting in a lot of work. That
Speaker 4: really leads up to January of twenty twenty three where
Speaker 4: Torte got killed. Prior to the police killing of Tortigita
Speaker 4: during a forest encampment raid on January eighteen, twenty twenty three,
Speaker 4: the occupation phase proved highly effective in preventing pre construction,
Speaker 4: but the killing and Tortighita essentially marked the end of
Speaker 4: the continuous occupation phase. What followed was a period of
Speaker 4: high octane intensity. Let's call this the revenge phase. Quoting
Speaker 4: in Atlanta anarchist. You get this kind of like trading
Speaker 4: blows with the cops repeatedly during that time, and things
Speaker 4: are getting pretty fucking crazy, hitting their highest pitch at
Speaker 4: March fifth quote. During the South River Music Festival on
Speaker 4: March fifth, a few hundred people splintered off from the
Speaker 4: festival and marched to the nearby Cop City construction site.
Speaker 4: The crowd repelled police and construction equipment was set on fire.
Speaker 4: The cops weretleated, quick swarming the area with all available
Speaker 4: units in Atlanta, kettled the festival and eventually arrested twenty
Speaker 4: three people, charging them with domestic terrorism. After the events
Speaker 4: of March fifth, the movement entered an odd limbo phase,
Speaker 4: with heightened tensions among the Stop Cop City coalition on
Speaker 4: the role of direct action and sabotage within mass movement actions.
Speaker 4: During this period, police fortified and regularly patrolled the perimeter
Speaker 4: around the forest. Entry became heavily restricted Following this denial
Speaker 4: of operating space. The forest around the slated construction site
Speaker 4: was preemptively clear cut to both prepare for construction and
Speaker 4: demoralize the movement. But a month later, the bail fund
Speaker 4: and legal defense nonprofit the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, was raided
Speaker 4: by police and were later charged with money laundering and
Speaker 4: charity fraud. Just a few days after the raid, the
Speaker 4: city Council approved a sixty seven million dollar Cop City
Speaker 4: funding package. The next day, organizers announced a referendum campaign
Speaker 4: to gather petition signatures to put the Cops City land
Speaker 4: Lease Ordinance on the upcoming November ballot. Despite setbacks, there
Speaker 4: was still energy going towards stopping Cop City, but it
Speaker 4: was fragmenting in ways that it hadn't really before. There
Speaker 4: was no clear consensus on the direction to take the movement.
Speaker 4: Previous periods of shift in the movement were often marked
Speaker 4: by an organized Week of Action, which was a convergence
Speaker 4: of people from all around the country or even the world,
Speaker 4: who traveled to Atlanta to partake in a week's worth
Speaker 4: of events, actions, and protests against Cop City. The Atlanta
Speaker 4: Police Foundation and contractors hired to build the facility the
Speaker 4: summer of twenty twenty three saw the sixth organized Week
Speaker 4: of Action, but it too was caught in this limbo phase,
Speaker 4: and without the forest as an operating zone, the Week
Speaker 4: of Action struggled to find its purpose despite the surge
Speaker 4: in movement participation around the city Hall budget vote earlier
Speaker 4: that June. The next phase was the first to be
Speaker 4: positively determined by the police, the repression phase, which really
Speaker 4: sets in around August of twenty twenty three with the
Speaker 4: Rico indictment charging sixty one people with racketeering, arson, and
Speaker 4: domestic terrorism. State repression then evolved in the form of
Speaker 4: persistent surveillance of activists, house raids, and additional charges, which
Speaker 4: leads to the current trial phase. Quote an Atlanta anarchist quote,
Speaker 4: I think an important aspect of this phase is obviously
Speaker 4: supporting your defendants, preparing for the potential of long term
Speaker 4: prisoner support, and also not letting the state be the
Speaker 4: one to close the book by doing this, because you
Speaker 4: don't want to let them define the narrative of this
Speaker 4: forever by getting to put their rubber stamp on the
Speaker 4: end of the trial and calling it Otherwise, the movement
Speaker 4: gets stuck in this permanent zombie phase where we're still saying,
Speaker 4: stop cop City is this thing that's happening. When it's built,
Speaker 4: it's built, it's right there, right like. It doesn't mean
Speaker 4: that we all just go home, but it means that
Speaker 4: you're like a veteran of this battle now and there's
Speaker 4: new shit to do, new stuff to work on. Even
Speaker 4: in retrospect, people have been largely hesitant to assign blame
Speaker 4: to a specific factor in why the fight to stop
Speaker 4: cop City fell short of achieving its stated goal. But
Speaker 4: we can track a decline in momentum which allowed the
Speaker 4: state to gain the upper hand. For nearly three years,
Speaker 4: state repression tactics failed to disrupt the growing momentum against
Speaker 4: the Cop City project. Forest raids, arrests, and criminal charges
Speaker 4: made little impact. The use of terrorism charges as a
Speaker 4: repression tactic started back in December of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 4: following an encampment raid resulting in six people being charged
Speaker 4: with domestic terrorism. This was the first time that charge
Speaker 4: has been used in Georgia, following its adoption in twenty
Speaker 4: seventeen in response to the whitepremacist mass shooting by Dylan Roof.
Speaker 4: Just a month after domestic terrorism charges were first deployed.
Speaker 4: Tortighito was killed by police in another forest raid, but
Speaker 4: this tragedy only seemed to strengthen the resolve of the
Speaker 4: movement to fight cop City, which then only grew. Similarly,
Speaker 4: the clear cutting of the force itself wasn't enough to
Speaker 4: demoralize the people in Atlanta. Rather, the hesitation to build
Speaker 4: on the momentum of a widely publicized direct action like
Speaker 4: March fifth provided this state in opening while the movement
Speaker 4: was stuck in limbo. Throughout this limbo phase, the movement
Speaker 4: was adjusting from intensified momentum and the high octane aspects
Speaker 4: leading to March fifth. But as the energy tapered down,
Speaker 4: the state jumped on that dip in momentum, then delta
Speaker 4: pretty significant blow with the Rico indictment. The Rico charges
Speaker 4: in August of twenty twenty three, followed by the series
Speaker 4: of house raids in February of twenty twenty four, were
Speaker 4: a pretty crippling one to punch that stifled the momentum
Speaker 4: to our almost a complete standstill. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist,
Speaker 4: A lot of people will argue their opinions about what
Speaker 4: was the stifling thing. I think some of the more
Speaker 4: electorally or mass movement. Big tent minded people would argue that,
Speaker 4: like March fifth, takes a lot of the wind out
Speaker 4: of the sails. I think a lot of people would
Speaker 4: disagree with that, just because like you can build on
Speaker 4: the momentum of a March fifth, you can build on
Speaker 4: like a triumphant battlefield victory, it's a lot harder to
Speaker 4: build on just everyone getting more charges and also people
Speaker 4: getting their doors kicked in really early in the morning.
Speaker 4: It's hard to build on that. Despite the Rico charges,
Speaker 4: acts of sabotage did continue, but isolated sabotage alone wasn't
Speaker 4: enough to propel the movement. After the referendum campaign was
Speaker 4: effectively nullified by the state and fall of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 4: there was a lack of willingness among its organizers to
Speaker 4: engage in serious efforts to get people engaged in mass
Speaker 4: actions or pressure campaigns targeted against elected officials. Something multiple
Speaker 4: activists in Atlanta have mentioned to me as a contributing
Speaker 4: factor to the eventual decline in momentum during this limbo
Speaker 4: stage is a sort of failure to prefigure alternative strategies
Speaker 4: and adapt After the forest occupation became impossible to maintain,
Speaker 4: especially considering just how much weight people had put into
Speaker 4: that strategy but then did not come up with a
Speaker 4: clear next step after the police were able to suppress
Speaker 4: that tactic by completing their ODA loops and improving their
Speaker 4: own strategies. The ODA loop is a four step military
Speaker 4: decision making model used across a large variety of professional fields,
Speaker 4: including policing. Step one, observe, gather as much information as possible,
Speaker 4: then orient, synthesize and information with background knowledge, decide on
Speaker 4: the next course of action using that newly synthesized information,
Speaker 4: and finally act and the results of your actions should
Speaker 4: then send you back to step one. Failure to act
Speaker 4: at all or too slowly often ends in defeat. To
Speaker 4: quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, you need contingency lines right,
Speaker 4: either things that you're willing to escalate in the current
Speaker 4: line of strategy that you're doing to make it still viable,
Speaker 4: or a complete change in strategy it can be changed
Speaker 4: in tactics to something new and exciting. Either of those
Speaker 4: are valid options. Doing both of them in the same
Speaker 4: time can be extremely effective, but at the end of
Speaker 4: the day, you have to when the cops start to
Speaker 4: break out of paralysis. An example from any eco defense
Speaker 4: or occupation, whether in Atlanta or somewhere else, when the
Speaker 4: cops start to break out of that paralysis, you have
Speaker 4: to escalate in some way. The occupation, the defense of it,
Speaker 4: has to escalate in some way to prevent them from
Speaker 4: feeling safe coming in or trying to, or the physical
Speaker 4: space of action to change, because now they need to
Speaker 4: recalibrate to oh, shit, like, not only is the occupation
Speaker 4: less assailable than we thought because there's been a change
Speaker 4: in tactics, but there's also a massive uptick and shit
Speaker 4: going on everywhere else, and that significantly impedes their ability
Speaker 4: to have an ODA loop to do battle with. You
Speaker 4: can even look at the ice pickups that got a
Speaker 4: lot of attention in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were not expecting
Speaker 4: that many people just to show up. You can see
Speaker 4: when the crowd starts to hit like a critical mass
Speaker 4: of rage and getting really close to those guys that
Speaker 4: they fucking panic. They freak out, like it's very clear
Speaker 4: even just in the small amount of their faces and
Speaker 4: their movements that you can see that they were panicking.
Speaker 4: Similar scenes have since taken place in Chicago and Portland.
Speaker 4: And I've seen this before with Bortac during the twenty
Speaker 4: twenty protests in Portland. I think anyone who has watched
Speaker 4: the Cops for Treat has seen this before. But the
Speaker 4: more the same thing happens, the more you get used
Speaker 4: to it, the more you experiment and find ways to
Speaker 4: adapt and overcome. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, cops panic
Speaker 4: and you can see it in the way they walk
Speaker 4: like they weren't ready for that, and next time they
Speaker 4: might be, which means you have to add something new,
Speaker 4: a new spice has to get thrown in a new
Speaker 4: flavor profile. They'll get used to pushing through crowds like
Speaker 4: that until someone hits them at the end of the day,
Speaker 4: and whether you're like confronting them on the ground or
Speaker 4: trying to get to the neighborhoods ahead of time to
Speaker 4: knock people's doors to get them out, Eventually cops will
Speaker 4: start to find ways to counteract your strategy, and eventually
Speaker 4: you will have to reshift and recalibrate the tools you
Speaker 4: are using to orient back to Atlanta, All these instances
Speaker 4: I've mentioned amount to failing to take advantage of key moments,
Speaker 4: whether that be in the aftermath of March fifth, the
Speaker 4: seeming impossibility of continue nude forest encampments or of the
Speaker 4: city's blanket refusal to accept the results of the referendum.
Speaker 4: In these moments, the police and the state were able
Speaker 4: to determine where battle lines were drawn, and quite literally
Speaker 4: so during the quote unquote block Cop City protest in
Speaker 4: October of twenty twenty three, where police easily repelled a
Speaker 4: protest march from even reaching the road to the Cop
Speaker 4: City construction site, and the state continued to push their
Speaker 4: lines forward with the joint fbiatf raids on activist houses
Speaker 4: in February twenty twenty four, which further stifled the movement
Speaker 4: and was coupled with months to years long persistent surveillance
Speaker 4: and intimidation denoted by cops parked outside of homes of
Speaker 4: alleged activists, mobile surveillance, and hidden cameras placed in front
Speaker 4: of activists homes and a local community center. One of
Speaker 4: the more frightening incidents came in May of twenty twenty four,
Speaker 4: where a resident of one of the homes raided that
Speaker 4: February woke up in the middle night to a bright
Speaker 4: light outside the bedroom window only to find a lit
Speaker 4: road flare catching the wooden railing of their porch steps
Speaker 4: on fire. One of the things I've been reflecting on
Speaker 4: regarding cop City is the way people talked about fear
Speaker 4: as a tool. Frank Herbert's litany against fear was a
Speaker 4: common refrain to overcome the fear that this state used
Speaker 4: as a weapon. But the first time I heard fear
Speaker 4: mentioned as an offensive measure wasn't in reference to this
Speaker 4: state using fear. It was in early twenty twenty two
Speaker 4: when I first visited the forest encampment, and the anarchists
Speaker 4: talked about how the police were scared of entering the forest,
Speaker 4: how delusions of Vietnam's style booby traps demonstrated that the
Speaker 4: cups are not impervious super soldiers. Instilling fear is a
Speaker 4: major aspect of police training. They are susceptible to emotional impulses,
Speaker 4: like all of us. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote. But
Speaker 4: while we understand our own fear, I think people often
Speaker 4: fall into the trap of not understanding that the state
Speaker 4: is also afraid of them. Because the state feels like
Speaker 4: this monolithic machine, like this unassailable entity, that it is
Speaker 4: not It's made up of people with flaws and emotions
Speaker 4: who have the same corrozol response to being threatened that
Speaker 4: you or I do. A big part of the lessons
Speaker 4: learned from Atlanta has to be of willingness to engage
Speaker 4: with them in a way that is personally endangering. That
Speaker 4: is the single way out. They're human and they get scared.
Speaker 4: The fear that I think had them so tight until
Speaker 4: May of twenty twenty two was a fear that manifested
Speaker 4: itself in a lot of paralysis. Fear is of normal
Speaker 4: human emotion to danger. So whether you're the most hardened
Speaker 4: swat team guy going up against the craziest eco freak
Speaker 4: in the world, fear is a normal reaction to that.
Speaker 4: But what really had them so tight was fear as
Speaker 4: a matter of them being paralyzed by it that they
Speaker 4: couldnot find out how to move. And once they did
Speaker 4: find out around May of twenty twenty two, we really
Speaker 4: start to see things change and like they were scared
Speaker 4: enough in the woods to shoot someone to death, like
Speaker 4: they were still afraid, we were able to instill an
Speaker 4: immense amount of fear in our enemy, which is an
Speaker 4: absolutely necessary tool if you're going to be on the
Speaker 4: very nimble, small green team insurgency side of things. You
Speaker 4: have to make your enemy afraid of the dark, but
Speaker 4: also you have your defensive strategy against fear. You would
Speaker 4: hear all the time in Atlanta, the whole let the
Speaker 4: fear wash over you and through you mantra. That was
Speaker 4: a thing that people talked about and said constantly, because
Speaker 4: you have to find a way to move through that paralysis. Eventually,
Speaker 4: and with the help of a multi agency task force,
Speaker 4: the cops in Atlanta were able to move through that
Speaker 4: fear and continue their actions. They were not totally paralyzed
Speaker 4: by it. In contrast, the pseudo paralysis affecting Stop Cop
Speaker 4: City only set in very late into the movement as
Speaker 4: a culative result of a coordinated sequence of oppression tactics.
Speaker 4: As the movement has been winding down and transitioning to
Speaker 4: court support, something people in Atlanta have had to balance
Speaker 4: is the urge to keep Stop Cop City in this
Speaker 4: sort of unalive zombie state where you're still kind of
Speaker 4: acting like it's an ongoing thing, even though the immediate
Speaker 4: local result is pretty clearly finished. But in keeping this
Speaker 4: kind of zombie version of the movement alive, it prevents
Speaker 4: you from actually moving on and internalizing what happened here
Speaker 4: and using that for whatever comes next, which is at
Speaker 4: this point a burgeoning police state and right wing power block.
Speaker 4: Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, internalizing not just in
Speaker 4: terms of like lessons learned and things that you need
Speaker 4: to learn from and skill up on to keep that
Speaker 4: honed combative edge in Atlanta, but to think about fighting
Speaker 4: on a larger scope than just Atlanta. As the cops
Speaker 4: took their lessons learned here nationwide in terms of how
Speaker 4: they're doing repression towards Palestinian liberation movements towards a lot
Speaker 4: of the way that ICE operations are currently happening. That
Speaker 4: necessitates that we also take our lessons learned here and
Speaker 4: also go to a larger scale with them. Also, if
Speaker 4: you never close the book yourself on this battle that
Speaker 4: you're a part of, which people incurred a massive amount
Speaker 4: of trauma doing at a certain point, this could just
Speaker 4: remain like an open wound on you forever if you
Speaker 4: let it. And it is probably unhelpful to keep seeing
Speaker 4: the movement to stop cop City is doing a rally here.
Speaker 4: Like when it's built, it's there, and now we need
Speaker 4: to move on to other things. We need to move
Speaker 4: on to other things that are larger than Atlanta. There's
Speaker 4: still a police state to engage with here. You don't
Speaker 4: need the container of this struggle to justify going out
Speaker 4: and taking action against the police. And there are other
Speaker 4: things happening in Atlanta. There's vice rates happening in Atlanta
Speaker 4: in the north suburbs of the city. Cop City is
Speaker 4: actively being enacted, and if people want to continue stopping it,
Speaker 4: they'll have to actually stop what the effects are which
Speaker 4: are now happening on a nationwide scale. An early irony
Speaker 4: of the movement was that though cop City was conceived
Speaker 4: as a training ground for police first, it became a
Speaker 4: training ground for anarchists. As top Cup City became the
Speaker 4: first mass movement following the twenty twenty George Floyd protests,
Speaker 4: whatever happened in Atlanta would demonstrate what activists have learned
Speaker 4: from the twenty twenty uprising, as well as influence what
Speaker 4: future movements against police expansion might look like. Atlanta Police
Speaker 4: Chief Darren Shecherbaum expressed as much during the Public Safety
Speaker 4: Training Center grand opening.
Speaker 3: Because when Antifa put out its call for individuals to
Speaker 3: rally here in this spot and on Peachtree Street, from
Speaker 3: across the nation and literally the globe. We were up
Speaker 3: against a playbook we had never seen at the Atlanta
Speaker 3: Police Department, and we ourselves put out the call for help,
Speaker 3: and no sheriff said no, No police chief said no.
Speaker 3: The Georgia State Patrol, the Department Natural Resources should ste
Speaker 3: by side of this department, as did the FBI and
Speaker 3: the ATF, because we all knew that that playbook was
Speaker 3: successful here in Atlanta, Georgia, it would find itself across
Speaker 3: this country and public safety be stymied wherever we go.
Speaker 4: While Atlanta served as this training ground for anarchists, in response,
Speaker 4: the state also used the movement to test out strategies
Speaker 4: for the next generation of counterinsurgency tactics, well before the
Speaker 4: cop City facility was finished being built. Now, with this
Speaker 4: specific localized struggle at completion, both organizers and the state
Speaker 4: are carrying lessons forward as Trump expands police power, deploys
Speaker 4: National Guard, increases ICE operations, and continues repression against organizers
Speaker 4: protesting the Palestinian genocide. To quote an Atlanta anarchist quote,
Speaker 4: I think as a matter of reimagining the struggle that
Speaker 4: you're a part of insurrectionary struggle is often an imaginative one.
Speaker 4: And if you were part of this thing here, you
Speaker 4: are now like a veteran of the fight in Atlanta.
Speaker 4: This thing, like this specific thing that was defend the
Speaker 4: Atlanta Forest. Top cop City is something to be learned
Speaker 4: from and valued and also moved on from and to
Speaker 4: move on from while taking lessons learned, experience gained, and
Speaker 4: connections made, and following those things through to their logical conclusion.
Speaker 4: Such that the state has as well. They have taken
Speaker 4: lessons learned from here and followed them through to their
Speaker 4: nationwide logical conclusions. We are necessitated to do that as well.
Speaker 4: That doesn't mean you have given up. It just means
Speaker 4: that there's new shit happening. It's helpful to re imagine
Speaker 4: yourself not as just we're in Atlanta, we're doing stop
Speaker 4: Coop City, to now you are engaged in a nationwide
Speaker 4: anti fascist struggle against like a fascist police state. This
Speaker 4: nationwide focus has always been an aspect of Stop Cop City.
Speaker 4: One of the movements key slogans was cop City is Everywhere.
Speaker 4: Organizers did speaking tours around the country to educate about
Speaker 4: the movement and thousands of people from all around the
Speaker 4: country and the world traveled to Atlanta to participate in
Speaker 4: weeks of action. The physical fight top Cop City also
Speaker 4: expanded outside of Atlanta with solidarity attacks and direct actions
Speaker 4: as a part of the tertiary targeting campaign against subcontractors
Speaker 4: and insurance companies. This nationwide drift also happened on the
Speaker 4: side of the state, with similar police training facilities having
Speaker 4: been proposed in dozens of other cities, and the strategies
Speaker 4: of repression used in Atlanta have been copied on a
Speaker 4: national level. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, now the cops
Speaker 4: are spreading out, and their strategies and the strategies of repression,
Speaker 4: both militantly on the ground and legally, and even their
Speaker 4: propaganda and their messaging has gone outwards from here. And
Speaker 4: so too, then must our lessons learned both in how
Speaker 4: we prepare and engage in struggle in Atlanta, but also
Speaker 4: how we make connections to the rest of the country.
Speaker 4: People who came here are now back home and will
Speaker 4: make connections to the people around them. The cops in
Speaker 4: different cities, they have big conferences. They talk to each other,
Speaker 4: they learn from each other. There's no reason that we
Speaker 4: shouldn't be, you know, doing so with caution and security culture.
Speaker 4: Don't have your Atlanta veteran hat on. But we have
Speaker 4: things to learn from each other, and if you were here,
Speaker 4: you've got a lot to potentially teach people. Even if
Speaker 4: that was just like, here's how we fucking run a
Speaker 4: kitchen where we cook for like four hundred people in
Speaker 4: a day, or here's how we sneak around in the
Speaker 4: middle of the night. This is a representative of the
Speaker 4: Fire and Movement Defense at a cop City trial press
Speaker 4: conference from September twenty twenty five.
Speaker 5: The horrors we predicted have come to pass. Federal agents
Speaker 5: now stock communities from coast to coast, masked and unnamed,
Speaker 5: snatching people from buses, farms, kitchens, and churches. Who can
Speaker 5: argue now that we were wrong to resist the endless
Speaker 5: expansion of police power, now that Trump commands them, now
Speaker 5: that they are his police. The very people who helped
Speaker 5: lay the groundwork now scramble to distance themselves from his orders,
Speaker 5: his camps, his federal troop deployments. But they built the logistics,
Speaker 5: they funded the training centers, they expanded the surveillance. Liberal
Speaker 5: governments like Atlantis helped pave the way for the descent
Speaker 5: of our country into autocracy.
Speaker 4: As Marlincrats of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund told The New Republic, quote,
Speaker 4: what's happening in Atlanta is a vision of the future.
Speaker 4: This is a test run of a repressive playbook that
Speaker 4: authorities on many different levels are experimenting with to discover
Speaker 4: what they can get away with. Let's look at some
Speaker 4: examples of expanding surveillance, increasing police resources, and these strategies
Speaker 4: for counter insertaency that are spreading in the era of
Speaker 4: Trump two point zero. In January of this year, Georgia
Speaker 4: Representative Marjorie Taylor Green introduced a resolution titled deeming certain
Speaker 4: conduct of members of Antifa as domestic terrorism and designating
Speaker 4: Antifa as domestic terrorist Organization, which the measure justifies by
Speaker 4: referencing multiple instances of protesters in Atlanta being charged with
Speaker 4: domestic terrorism. The Atlanta based surveillance company Flock Safety, gained
Speaker 4: early notoriety for their camera towers placed around the slated
Speaker 4: Copcity construction site in the South River Forest, which protesters
Speaker 4: repeatedly toppled. Flock has grown massively the past four years,
Speaker 4: with over eighty thousand quote unquote AI powered cameras in
Speaker 4: forty nine states. These cameras complete over twenty billion scans
Speaker 4: per month. Flock cameras and license plate readers have spread
Speaker 4: all around the country and are used by all manners
Speaker 4: of agencies, including ICE, as well as Texas sheriffs, who
Speaker 4: have used the nationwide camera network to track pregnant women
Speaker 4: seeking abortions. Border Patrol has used Atlanta's local flock camera
Speaker 4: network to make over three thousand and two hundred searches
Speaker 4: from January to November twenty twenty five. In April twenty
Speaker 4: twenty five, President Trump signed an executive order titled Strengthening
Speaker 4: and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to pursue criminals and protect
Speaker 4: innocent citizens. This order calls to quote unleash high impact
Speaker 4: local police forces, protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly
Speaker 4: accused and abused by state or local officials, and surge
Speaker 4: resources to officers in needuote. It directs the Attorney General
Speaker 4: to create a mechanism to have private sector law firms
Speaker 4: provide pro bono legal events to police officers who quote
Speaker 4: unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the
Speaker 4: performance of their official duties to enforce the law. This
Speaker 4: tries to make it harder for a police to be
Speaker 4: held accountable for both civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending
Speaker 4: qualified a mus to the criminal realm. The order also
Speaker 4: calls to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training,
Speaker 4: and strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as
Speaker 4: to quote seek enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers,
Speaker 4: promote investment in the security in capacity of prisons, and
Speaker 4: increase the investment in and collection, distribution and uniformity of
Speaker 4: crime data across jurisdictions. The Attorney General is directed to
Speaker 4: review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on local
Speaker 4: or state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the
Speaker 4: performance of law enforcement functions. And then finally, quote, the
Speaker 4: Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with
Speaker 4: Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate,
Speaker 4: shall increase the provision of excess military and national security
Speaker 4: assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement.
Speaker 4: And shall determine how military and national security assets, training,
Speaker 4: non lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized.
Speaker 4: To prevent crime. As the police become further militarized, the
Speaker 4: military prepares to do more policing. One of the executive
Speaker 4: orders from Trump's police takeover of Washington d C contains
Speaker 4: a section directing the Secretary of Defense to quote designate
Speaker 4: an appropriate number of each state's trained National Guard members
Speaker 4: to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization to assist federal, state,
Speaker 4: and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances, and that quote,
Speaker 4: a standing National Guard Quick Reaction Force shall be resourced, trained,
Speaker 4: and available for rapid nationwide deployment. Later in October of
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five, the Department of Defense sent out memos
Speaker 4: to each state's National Guard mandating that each state have
Speaker 4: their own Quick Reaction forces operational by January first, twenty
Speaker 4: twenty six, with crowd control equipment and two full time
Speaker 4: trainers by the National Guard Bureau being provided to each unit.
Speaker 4: The units contain, on average, five hundred troops per state,
Speaker 4: ordered to be ready to deploy within eight to twenty
Speaker 4: four hours. The initial portion of the Bureau training courses
Speaker 4: cover how to quote form squad sized riot control formations
Speaker 4: employ a riot baton as member of a riot control
Speaker 4: formation how to supervise a riot, slash, crowd control operation,
Speaker 4: crowd management techniques, and domestic civil disturbance training. On September
Speaker 4: twenty second, Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as
Speaker 4: a domestic terrorist organization. Three days later, Trump signed the
Speaker 4: National Security Presidential Memorandum seven on Countering Domestic Terrorism and
Speaker 4: Organized Political Violence, which calls for a new national la
Speaker 4: enforcement strategy to quote investigate all participants of these criminal
Speaker 4: and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that
Speaker 4: foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in
Speaker 4: criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts unquote.
Speaker 4: The memo orders local joint terrorism task forces to quote
Speaker 4: investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or
Speaker 4: radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, or
Speaker 4: conspiracy against rights, as well as investigating institutional and individual funders,
Speaker 4: including employees of organizations which are quote responsible for, sponsor
Speaker 4: or otherwise aid in a bet the principal actors engaging
Speaker 4: in the criminal conduct unquote. As previously described, the Treasury
Speaker 4: Secretary will work with Thetorney General to quote identify and
Speaker 4: disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence,
Speaker 4: and shall deploy investigative tools to examine financial flows and
Speaker 4: coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit funding streams. The
Speaker 4: memo also instructs the IRS to quote take action to
Speaker 4: ensure that no tax exempt entities are directly or indirectly
Speaker 4: financing political violence or domestic terrorism unquote, and that the
Speaker 4: IRS shall refer organizations and their employees to the Department
Speaker 4: of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution, quoting the memo
Speaker 4: one final time, quote, Investigations shall prioritize crimes such as
Speaker 4: the following assaulting federal officers or employees, conspiracy against rights,
Speaker 4: conspiracy to commit offense, solicitation to commit a crime of violence,
Speaker 4: money laundering, funding of terrorist acts, or otherwise facilitating terrorism, arson,
Speaker 4: violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act RICO,
Speaker 4: and major fraud against the United States unquote. At Trump's
Speaker 4: White House ANTIFO roundtable meeting, Seamus Bruner, the director of
Speaker 4: research at the Government Accountability Institute, discussed his theory of
Speaker 4: how a network of NGOs are funding ANTIFA, and specifically
Speaker 4: mentioned stop cop City.
Speaker 6: There was an event in Atlanta called stop cop City.
Speaker 6: Over sixty rioters were charged with domestic terrorism. These groups
Speaker 6: received money for that from both the billionaire class as
Speaker 6: well as taxpayer money.
Speaker 4: So On May one, twenty twenty five, Homeland Security Investigations,
Speaker 4: Secret Service and the acting ICE Director rated a home
Speaker 4: in Irving, California, looking for a man who allegedly posted
Speaker 4: flyers around Los Angeles containing the names, pictures, and phone
Speaker 4: numbers of ICE agents, with text in Spanish reading careful
Speaker 4: with these faces. In April of twenty twenty three, three
Speaker 4: activists were arrested for allegedly posting flyers identifying a police
Speaker 4: officer nected to the killing of Tortigita on the mailboxes
Speaker 4: in that officer's neighborhood in Barlow County, Georgia, about forty
Speaker 4: miles from Atlanta. The activists were charged with felony intimidation
Speaker 4: and were later added to the Cop City Weako case.
Speaker 4: To circle back to the topic of fear, the targeting
Speaker 4: of people putting up flyers simply identifying cops or anonymous
Speaker 4: ICE agents demonstrates how the state understands fear as a weapon.
Speaker 4: That's why they did the reco charges. That's why they
Speaker 4: do the house raids. That's why they do overt surveillance
Speaker 4: where you're getting followed around by police. But they are
Speaker 4: susceptible to fear as well. Through their actions, ICE demonstrates
Speaker 4: a high level of fear. They are taking massive steps
Speaker 4: to hide the identities of ICE agents on the ground
Speaker 4: and punishing people who attempt to identify these agents. They're
Speaker 4: complaining about being compared to Nazis and called the Gestapo.
Speaker 4: They're referencing very dubious statistics about an increase in assaults
Speaker 4: against officers, and they are afraid enough to shoot their
Speaker 4: guns at unarmed people more than half a dozen times
Speaker 4: in the past six months. They are scared, and as
Speaker 4: evil and super soldiery as they may seem, they are
Speaker 4: indeed afraid. To quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, unless
Speaker 4: you do something to keep them afraid, eventually it will stop.
Speaker 4: Unless you change your strategy, change course, escalate in some
Speaker 4: way that shatters their ODA loop, they will break free
Speaker 4: of their paralysis and they will find a way through
Speaker 4: their fear. So when that starts to happen, it's time
Speaker 4: to do something new and insane, because you have to
Speaker 4: keep them afraid, because, like by every moral right they
Speaker 4: should be. They should be fucking terrified to leave their homes.
Speaker 4: And if they are too a f to leave their homes,
Speaker 4: then they can't go out and do their jobs at
Speaker 4: the end of the day. That's their odor loop right there.
Speaker 4: The scale of fear as a tool of repression is
Speaker 4: always exponentially larger than this scale of physical or legal repression.
Speaker 4: It punches well above its weight. You can look at
Speaker 4: Atlanta as a good example of this, and you can
Speaker 4: even look at some of the arrests made in response
Speaker 4: to Palestinian liberation protests. It takes black bagging six people
Speaker 4: to paralyze six thousand because it's terrifying, because it's scary,
Speaker 4: like it's fucked up, that's a bad thing to have
Speaker 4: happened to you, and like, of course, people are afraid.
Speaker 4: Fear is one of those things that if you're engaging
Speaker 4: an anti fascist struggle, whether you're an anti fascist, whether
Speaker 4: you're an anarchist or whatever, all of us have an
Speaker 4: ethical obligation to ourselves and the people around us to
Speaker 4: push through fear as an emotion, to find ways to
Speaker 4: work with it, because it won't go away, and it shouldn't.
Speaker 4: Fear can also keep you safe. But we are necessitated
Speaker 4: by the political moment we are in to find a
Speaker 4: way to take extensive action in spite of that unquote.
Speaker 4: Twenty twenty was a lot of people's first experience with
Speaker 4: mass protest, and some of this people then carry those
Speaker 4: experiences into Copcity. But then for other people, Stop cop
Speaker 4: City was their first experience. And now you have an
Speaker 4: even younger generation of people, the Gen Alpha terrorists, who
Speaker 4: aren't even old enough to have been involved in Atlanta.
Speaker 4: But people are still looking at what happened in Atlanta
Speaker 4: as this bridge gap between twenty twenty and twenty twenty five,
Speaker 4: the movement to Stop Cop City as the bridge between
Speaker 4: these two different eras of uprising and resistance against authoritarianism.
Speaker 4: As the Copcity chapter closes, activists in Atlanta want people
Speaker 4: to carry on what's been learned in the contents of
Speaker 4: their struggle onto whatever the next volume is. Because Cop
Speaker 4: City itself is in a sequence of events that have
Speaker 4: happened beyond and longer than what me or anyone involved
Speaker 4: in Cop City has been alive by generations. Cop City
Speaker 4: is not Volume one. Cop City is volume like thirty two,
Speaker 4: but at the same time it's also the immediate prequel
Speaker 4: to the rise of a nationwide expansion of police power
Speaker 4: and surveillance led by a wanna be right wing strong man.
Speaker 4: Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, a big lesson learned from
Speaker 4: Atlanta is that it is way safer to do shit
Speaker 4: in the middle of the night than anything else. We've
Speaker 4: had exactly one arrest made over the years, an arrest
Speaker 4: that's not gone to trial. This is an alleged crime
Speaker 4: of one midnight sabotage action. Of the dozens and dozens
Speaker 4: and dozens of ursins that have happened, and this arrest
Speaker 4: happened very late into the movement. Out of the dozens
Speaker 4: and dozens of attacks that have happened, only one arrest
Speaker 4: has been made after the fact. Another lesson learned is
Speaker 4: the difficulty of day counter surveillance and how much that
Speaker 4: requires militancy as a daily practice to again quote from
Speaker 4: an anonymous anarchist in Atlanta quote, militant anarchism as a
Speaker 4: daily practice understanding your adversary, not just as this thing
Speaker 4: that you meet on the field for twenty minutes of
Speaker 4: action and then you both go home and like call it,
Speaker 4: but that they are constantly pursuing you that you are
Speaker 4: being like hunted for sport, and you have to evade
Speaker 4: and maneuver constantly. That security culture is a persistent thing
Speaker 4: throughout the years, that you are going to continually keep
Speaker 4: having to be a part of it and do so
Speaker 4: in a very disciplined way. Unquote. A lot of the
Speaker 4: success that stopcop City achieved was based on a willingness
Speaker 4: to take an extremely militant approach to prefigurative infrastructure, which
Speaker 4: added longevity to the combative struggle. Both were necessitated as
Speaker 4: symbiotic elements of this same curt feature. Throughout the Cop
Speaker 4: City struggle, organizers and activists learned that if you're not
Speaker 4: always able to engage in a directly combative fight, using
Speaker 4: militancy and discipline in their infrastructural projects the same way
Speaker 4: they would in a combative engagement, helps prepare for what
Speaker 4: will be necessary when things do turn combative. Quoting an
Speaker 4: Atlanta anarchist quote, the state is this constantly churning machine,
Speaker 4: like it is always trying to acquire new tools and
Speaker 4: equipment and lessons, and we can't just sit still while
Speaker 4: they do this and be like, okay, Well, at some
Speaker 4: point in four to five years, a flashpoint will happen
Speaker 4: at the place that I live, and I'll go out
Speaker 4: there and I'll be like I was in Atlanta, So
Speaker 4: I'll be good because I remember how to do all that.
Speaker 4: Because if you do nothing for the next four to
Speaker 4: five years, we're just going to be reinventing the wheel
Speaker 4: over and over again, and all the like fucked up
Speaker 4: trauma that you incurred doing that won't have been helpful
Speaker 4: at all if you don't remember the skills learned on
Speaker 4: the ground, because all skills atrophy and get weaker over time.
Speaker 4: Looking back at Stop Coop City won't provide all the
Speaker 4: answers to solve the problems facing the country today, especially
Speaker 4: in light of the end result of the movement, But
Speaker 4: it would be a mistake to overlook the ways Stop
Speaker 4: Coop City made a legitimate impact on the resulting facility
Speaker 4: and the political situation in Atlanta and beyond. I think
Speaker 4: there's ways of looking at degrees of success the movement
Speaker 4: had while still recognizing its obvious shortcomings, considering the fact
Speaker 4: that there is a facility called the Atlanta Public Safety
Speaker 4: Training Center, but a small group of activists turned a
Speaker 4: proposed police training facility into a national political issue. Its
Speaker 4: opening was delayed by years at at least thirty million
Speaker 4: dollars over budget, and the current facility lacks the full
Speaker 4: mock city design that it initially had, which inspired the
Speaker 4: Cop City namesake. Moving forward, both these successes and shortcomings
Speaker 4: will be internalized by thousands of people who traveled to
Speaker 4: or lived in Atlanta and joined in the movement to
Speaker 4: stop Cop City. As Trump now signs executive orders expanding
Speaker 4: military equipment, federal training, and legal protections for police, deploys
Speaker 4: the National Guard to quell civil disturbance, and targets anti fascists, anarchists,
Speaker 4: and left wing activists or ENGOs as domestic terrorists. Quoting
Speaker 4: an Atlanta anarchist quote, what we are seeing is the
Speaker 4: logical conclusion of our adversaries lessons learned in Atlanta, taking
Speaker 4: the things that they learned how to do here, the
Speaker 4: skills they honed, taken to a nationwide scale. This is
Speaker 4: the logical conclusion of that. And there's a reason that
Speaker 4: they are doing that. And if they are doing that,
Speaker 4: then we should also do that. Like there's logical conclusions
Speaker 4: and escalations of the things that we learned in Atlanta,
Speaker 4: that it would be silly for us to not try
Speaker 4: and push the further, including expanding the physical and metaphysical
Speaker 4: terrain of battle. The immediate terrain for stop Copcity was
Speaker 4: obviously the forest and now the cop City site itself,
Speaker 4: but there was also the rest of Atlanta and all
Speaker 4: the other construction sites, and then all these subcontractors around
Speaker 4: the country and everything that supplies them. This same model
Speaker 4: can apply to, say, the Palestine protests. There's a network
Speaker 4: that exists beyond Columbia University campus that extends into the
Speaker 4: weapons manufacturing industry, which could be targeted beyond consumer boycotts,
Speaker 4: like what we saw was shack But what we saw
Speaker 4: in Atlanta, where boycotts were an aspect, but by far
Speaker 4: not the most effective aspect and in fact forcefully inflicting
Speaker 4: monetary damage, caused a much greater degree of hurt to
Speaker 4: the companies involved in the Copsity project as opposed to
Speaker 4: the infighting caused by a walluse boycott. When reframing what
Speaker 4: the terrain of battle could entail, it is actually intimidating
Speaker 4: to think about what the reality of stopping these things
Speaker 4: might look like. And as soon as you realize that
Speaker 4: these fights go beyond a physical building. It becomes this
Speaker 4: love crafty and entity that exists everywhere, and it's unnerving
Speaker 4: to contemplate what you'd be forced to do to actually
Speaker 4: realistically confront that. Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, it's
Speaker 4: important to not get trapped in the you know, we're
Speaker 4: doing an occupation on college campus. We're just going to
Speaker 4: keep trying to do an occupation on college campus over
Speaker 4: and over again, and the cops really good at clearing
Speaker 4: us up. But now maybe this time. And I think
Speaker 4: a part of the struggle here though, for people is
Speaker 4: when you decentralize like that, the thing that you're doing
Speaker 4: starts to take on a much different vibe. It can
Speaker 4: be everywhere versus this is the college campus where we're
Speaker 4: doing protest. I generally think at the end of the day,
Speaker 4: it starts to feel a little bit too much like terrorismy,
Speaker 4: it starts to feel too much like an insurgency, and
Speaker 4: you see the path, you see the Pandora's box start
Speaker 4: to open up a little bit, and you back off
Speaker 4: because it's scary and that this thing will kill you.
Speaker 4: This thing will try and kill you eventually, if you
Speaker 4: push it far enough, it will try and kill you.
Speaker 4: And I might succeed, And like, that's just the reality
Speaker 4: of engaging with fascism combatively as an ideology, it's the
Speaker 4: reality of engaging with advanced capitalism. That was the reality
Speaker 4: of engaging with the police state, one that is well
Speaker 4: understood in Atlanta and in many other places that this
Speaker 4: isn't a game. You're not gonna get anywhere, just kind
Speaker 4: of sitting on the same college campus green over and
Speaker 4: over again, hoping for a different result. And as we've
Speaker 4: seen this year with the State Department cracking down on
Speaker 4: pro Palestine protests, just sitting there on the college green
Speaker 4: doesn't prevent you from being black bagged by the FEDS,
Speaker 4: taken to a black site, and deported. To close the episode,
Speaker 4: in September twenty twenty four, the Georgia Attorney General's Office
Speaker 4: dropped the money laundering charges against the organizers with the
Speaker 4: Atlanta Solidarity Fund, though the defendants still remained on the
Speaker 4: Rico indictment. Almost a full year later, on September ninth,
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five, the defense successfully argued that the State
Speaker 4: AG's office did not have the jurisdictional authority to prosecute
Speaker 4: the sixty one defendants under the State's Rico Statute due
Speaker 4: to simple procedural error in neglecting to first ask the
Speaker 4: governor if the AG's office could prosecute this case. Judge
Speaker 4: Farmer found that the AG does not have the authority
Speaker 4: to prosecute count one of the Rico indictment, the racketeering
Speaker 4: and conspiracy charges. Without the sweeping Rico charges engulfing this
Speaker 4: sixty one defendants, just five defendants would be left with
Speaker 4: Count two of the indictment, the domestic terrorism charges, which
Speaker 4: the AG does have authority to prosecute, and Count three,
Speaker 4: the arson charge, though Judge Farmer indicated that that charge
Speaker 4: could also be thrown out on a similar technicality. The
Speaker 4: prosecution is appealing this decision, and the defense has argued
Speaker 4: that the state domestic terrorism law violates a constitution and
Speaker 4: is far too broad and should be altered or overturned.
Speaker 4: Judge Farmer has yet to rule on this, but he's
Speaker 4: expected to very soon. Some of these sixty one defendants
Speaker 4: could face charges individually in Fulton, Indicab County, but that
Speaker 4: remains to be seen. The referendum case is still under
Speaker 4: appeal in federal court, and the case against Jack Mazurich
Speaker 4: is still in pre trial. Just because the Copsity trial
Speaker 4: is finally progressing does not mean that movement participants are
Speaker 4: safe nowvoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchists quote, people should be very
Speaker 4: mindful going into the trial phase that that does not
Speaker 4: mean that they are safe. There is no statute of
Speaker 4: limitations on a lot of this stuff. Like with a
Speaker 4: lot of radical movements, You're going to have to hold
Speaker 4: a lot of that shit forever. Rely on support structures,
Speaker 4: rely on your community, be careful about who you talk to. Unquote.
Speaker 4: As Stopcop City becomes history, there will be an influx
Speaker 4: of people trying to define the legacy of the movement,
Speaker 4: whether that's through podcasts, documentaries, a college dissertation, or who
Speaker 4: knows how many books are incoming. There already has been
Speaker 4: a true crimification of the movement in certain coverage which
Speaker 4: grossly objectifies the life of Torti Guita, platforms police as
Speaker 4: more objective than movement participants, and removes autonomy from key
Speaker 4: subjects to reframe the entire movement around other public facing individuals.
Speaker 4: To quote an Atlanta anarchist one final time quote, I
Speaker 4: think a big lesson from Atlanta and this is one
Speaker 4: that we actually still have to win at is to
Speaker 4: not let outside forces, whether that be the state or capital,
Speaker 4: define the ending. That is a scope of battle that
Speaker 4: we are still engaged with and still have to win.
Speaker 4: We need to close the book on it ourselves, need
Speaker 4: to rubber stamp it ourselves. No other entity can do
Speaker 4: that for us. It would be disastrous if they did.
Speaker 4: Unquote this has been it could happen here, see you
Speaker 4: on the other side.
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