Three conversations from the movement to stop cop city and defend the weelaunee forest.
In Atlanta, Georgia, police and politicians have been attempting to destroy a forest to build a militarized police training facility, known as Cop City. Resistance has been diverse and fierce. These discussions were conducted in March of 2023, two weeks after hundreds of people stormed a construction site for Cop City and destroyed it. In the subsequent reaction, 23 people were arrested at a music festival and charged with domestic terrorism. When we conducted these interviews, most of those defendants were still incarcerated in Dekalb County Jail, and the movement was in a moment of recomposition.
These three conversations with diverse participants in the struggle illustrate the resilience, joy, and stakes of the fight. We hope that these conversations will help illustrate the lives and worlds created in common in the Weelaunee Forest, and will inspire new connections and solidarities to emerge.
These discussions were originally facilitated for the purpose of translation into other languages, to spread information and context about the fight against Cop City among comrades around the world. This is the original English version.
For more information about this struggle and how to plug in, please check out:
Defendtheatlantaforest.org
stopcopcitysolidarity.org
Stopreevesyoung.com
1
Setting: The living room of a collective house in Atlanta. People are arrayed on couches, chairs, standing nearby and listening in. Snacks and sparkling water cover the table.
Q: Before we dive specifically into the current struggle around the Weelaunee Forest and Cop City, can you talk about the past struggles, cultural or historical reference points that helped formed your foundational politics, and how that has led to this moment?
Raphael: I guess I’ll say what’s not a reference point for me, which is most North American land defense struggles. I think most people from here who have participated in this struggle have no direct participation in those sorts of things. Not that we’re against them, just that’s not the valve towards participation. It is for a lot of participants in the movement, but not many from Atlanta. For me, the closest thing that’s representative of that is the anti-roads struggle in the UK in the 90s.…I think in everyone’s mind, part of what you want in the struggle is Standing Rock-level participation, but obviously we’re in a completely different context…we can’t just do what they did. We can’t have a prayer camp that eventually leads to 12,000 people.
Scheherazade: I’ve been a participant in many movements since about 2010. Occupy Wall Street was the first big movement that I was a part of. And then the waves of anti-police protests locally around the country that preceded what later became codified as Black Lives Matter. Those were all the most formative for me. And, because of my age, this strongly impacted my sense of what the role of individuals and small groups are in struggles, which is probably different from people who were radicalized after the events in Ferguson in 2014. They probably have a different idea about what politics is. I feel like I was radicalized in a period of extreme social peace, and so that affects my ideas. Also, I developed my sense of self and politics within a framework of hardcore punk music, and not through participation in civic, student, or political organizations, or through participation in the university system or any kind of institutional thing like that.
When I think about the current movement, a lot of people I’m close to think about the ZAD in France. There’s the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty movement (SHAC) which was a reference point for a few people, for certain things. When I was first getting into radical politics, that was being crushed… But then, also actually the Narita Airport struggle was huge. I know a couple people who went through phases of watching all the crazy videos on YouTube of Japanese anti-airport riots.
Q: It seems like Atlanta has a big hardcore/punk scene?
Raphael: We have a hardcore scene the exact size of most college towns, and Atlanta is the eighth largest metropolitan area in the country. It’s vibrant, but it’s not to-scale, not in the way we might think it would be. Not as good as Hammond, Indiana or Hattiesburg, Mississippi… But it is totally true, that all the music aspects of the movement are not done cynically at all. It’s not like activists being poseurs. It’s just actually that most of us come from participation in some sort of DIY music culture, probably a majority being hardcore, but others as well. I don’t believe in mass society as a reachable thing; you can reach different algorithm segments, and one that we’re tuned into that we can consistently reach is people who participate in DIY or music subcultures.
Q: That’s something that has been very obvious from a distance about Atlanta. Any time, anywhere, that I’ve been around people talking about what’s going on here, people are always referencing that what sets the Atlanta movement apart is the centrality of joy. And it seems like the access point to joy is mainly through music. It’s the palpable reputation of the movement.
This critique of mass society reminds me, our friend from Japan studies what he calls “inhabitants’ struggles,” locally-specific, molecular struggles, in opposition to vast social movements. At the end of the Japanese 60s there was a disintegration of these mass social movements, particularly due to political in-fighting and the Left completely devouring itself through violence, like assassinations and tortures of various opposing sects. At the same time, there was this proliferation of extremely site-based, localized struggles. Struggles over the construction of the Narita airport, or development in villages, or mercury poisoning in Minamata, that were more tied to people’s subsistence and experience of needing to live, versus a political ideology. So it’s interesting that you mention the Narita Airport, which is also a reference point for me.
From a distance, we’ve been continually amazed at how you have managed to dodge the pitfalls of the Left and “woke” culture that continue to devour so many movements everywhere else. We’re curious what that experience has been like, and how you’ve done it? Or, is it even intentional? This is an interesting tension that we’re trying to unpack. Our friend who studies these inhabitants’ struggles is interested precisely because the participants are not necessarily “political”, but develop militancy tied to their own direct experience of immiseration or attacks on their subsistence. I think he might say that that’s what allows these struggles to avoid being devoured by the Left. But it seems like you all have been able to engage in a fairly voluntaristic struggle. You’ve decided what the struggle is and built around it…and yet, you haven’t been taken over by the Left.
Myra: When I hear that question, my first thought is that for many years, my first introduction into anything political was being extremely hated and ostracized by the Left. From there, it was not possible to work with the Left in a bigger sense, and necessitated doing things anyway. At some point, I think particularly with this movement, it’s not organized from a place of trying to appease the Left, but it’s something that other people can join and are encouraged to join.
Bud: I think one aspect of it is that people who are really active participants in the movement, including some of the organizations that are participating, are very aware of how this movement began. And they saw the ways that allowed for the movement to progress and to grow. And that helped to keep things contained…if there’s a moment that the Left tries to re-create the narrative about how the movement began, that is where it could become problematic, but they haven’t done that. And I think that this is because all of us actually really feel like we’re winning. Creating external divides versus internal communication just hasn’t happened because people understand that that would destroy the movement.
Scheherazade: To add to what you’re saying, at one point, pretty early on, that did happen. In the late summer/fall of 2021, before the encampments began. There had been some acts of sabotage and no participatory action, and the Leftists did construct a coalition and an organizing initiative that excluded all of us for the most part. And that incentivized a certain kind of coalitional politics that mobilized people according to their “respective positions,” which is the watch-word of identity politics. So there were different groups, and they were all supposed combine their respective experiences to contain a universal experience. So there were some students, black women, LGBTQ groups, there’s all of this, and they’re all pseudo-hierarchically organized around the most oppressed. And they destroyed one another in three months. There’s all kinds of ways that they narrate this that tends to blame the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They were the most powerful group within that coalition, and they simply refused to lose. And that was because of the way that the coalition was organized, that meant that they had to fuck over people who were also trying to fuck them over. And all of those groups, I believe, quit. After the vote [by City Council, to build Cop City] passed, they quit. They were like, well, we’re going to vote these people out in two years.
And so, within six months it went from people at farmer’s markets and anarchists and people in the DIY subcultures, to a Leftist coalition, and then back to square one. And I think that since that moment, the idea of creating a lot of internal conversation in the movement has been suppressed. The idea of linking up with everyone, like “we’re stronger when we all get into the same room together,” “let’s not recreate the wheel”—these are the things that people don’t say, because they’re not true. People do a lot of redundant tasks, people are doing all the same kinds of things but slightly differently, people don’t know what other groups are doing…it allows them to ignore people that they strongly dislike. And, it allows them to not know about people that they don’t trust. It means that a lot of forms of action are not possible. But, in my opinion, it’s contributed to the longevity of the movement. People who have real or completely petty grievances with one another can just stay away from one another. And I’m sure that there’s hundreds of people who believe that the movement is being mismanaged because of “internal dynamics”, and…maybe they’re right? I don’t know. I don’t have to hear from them, and they don’t have to hear from me. So, I like that.
Raphael: To add some larger context for the Left in Atlanta: for one, Georgia has not historically had high union density. Currently, it’s less than 5% the entire workforce, including public sector workers are less than 5% unionized, and it’s never been particularly high. There’s no sub-set of the population that can look back on being a formerly politicized proletarian. That does not exist here. And the NGO-backed institutional Left is also incredibly weak here. After 2016, the Black Lives Matter money ran out, the ones that were able to get jobs in Oakland, New York and Chicago left here. The rest got spat back out into the hood, and some have died since then by police violence.
And since then, in my opinion, the Left effectively does not exist here. There’s the DSA, which is a voluntarist organization made up of downwardly-mobile white kids with bad affects. And then there’s small amounts of paid black staffers that are part of a clientalist structure with the local black bourgeoisie that works in tandem with corporate white elites… And they have no base of support. In my city council district, Joy Sheperd, who was the city council person who introduced the Copy City bill, she lost her electoral seat. Some people in the movement say it’s because of her position on Cop City, but it’s actually just because the guy who ran against her is from here and has good relationships with local wealthy people.
That’s just to show how weak the Left is. But, the people I organize with, we’ve had some level of consistency together for over a decade. And, also, the autonomous organizational Left that aren’t getting any NGO money, but they are also in formal organizations, some of these groups have been in the movement for a while and have been able to stand the test of time and have lasted through multiple cycles of struggle and down-time. It’s us and them, that have been able to stand the test of time, whereas the institutional Left is nothing, and can’t do that. So it’s obvious that, once struggle gets going, our respective forces are the most relevant.
Scheherazade: There are probably thousands of people who think this movement is too toxic. Or that it’s racist. Someone went on a podcast and said, “The struggle against Cop City is more upsetting than Cop City itself because of the internalized racism.” I’m sure it’s just music to the ears of the police foundation. You know, there’s people who think all kinds of dumb things, there’s plenty of anarchists all over the country who have conspiracy theories about vague things. People find excuses not to participate in the struggle. This one, though, might be too easy to participate in for many of those types of narratives to take hold. It’s irresistible to a lot of people, I think. There’s not a lot of gatekeeping going on. The bad part is that it doesn’t necessarily challenge people to change what they believe. But it allows you to just think whatever you believe, and fight for whatever it is you think you’re fighting for.
Myra: I think that in a lot of cities there’s this feeling that people aren’t powerful to do anything without the Left. But because of the histories that have been described, being a group of people who have worked together for a long time through struggle and lulls, it gives a sense of confidence to do it without needing to call on the Left. Critiques do come up, and a lot of it we just don’t have to talk about, but there are also critiques that are taken to heart. It’s not from a Leftist moralist perspective, but more of like, well these people have been there over and over and they’re upset for these reasons. And so people have conversations and try to work things out that really matter, but not from a moralist position…it’s more like, that person is upset, and so I’m upset that they’re upset and would like to help fix it.
Q: That’s really interesting. What you’re saying is that it’s on a more personal, real level. People actually talking to each other, less factions warring on the internet…
Scheherazade: Or ignoring each other.
Q: And it’s big enough that you actually can just ignore people.
Scheherazade: I also want to say that people in the movement have worked hard to uplift the participation of a very strong, independent Black politics that actually has an advantage over the ability of anti-oppression activists to over-determine a certain range of discourses. That can’t actually be underestimated. In my view, the participation of groups that I would call post-Black nationalist—all of the exclusively Black groups that are in the movement—they don’t use the word “micro-aggression”, that’s not part of their understanding of what racism is. Their idea of power is not based on individual attitudes and actions, it’s based on structural factors and histories. And I think people have worked hard to uplift those perspectives, to the detriment of the “woke”, university-funded, post-Judith Butler identity politics Left/stuff. Without the all-Black groups doing their thing, pushing hard, I think that would all be way worse than it is. And this stuff would have already cannibalized things. The fact that there’s groups that are like, “Yeah of course white people are kind of weird to us…” Well, they start with the assumption that it’s not going to get any better until there’s Black self-determination and so, they’re not as concerned…
Raphael: It’s true. Since the Week of Action I’ve tried to tell people from around the country who are visiting that people from the Black nationalist current are much better to work with than abolitionists. This has just been proven true. I think it has to do with everything that you just said, but also that while there’s currently no insurrectionary position within Black nationalism, that milieu is still actively supporting people in prison who are part of an insurrectionary trajectory within Black nationalism, and I think that that definitely helps them feel like better. “Yeah, ok—the mostly white kids are doing that thing. That’s fine. We’re supporting people who did CRAZIER SHIT than that!” Whereas, abolitionist politics completely divorces itself from that, it has no insurrectionary trajectory when it comes from the academy and NGOs.
Q: Would you say that that is the main distinction between those two currents: Black nationalism and abolition?
B: Didn’t “abolitionism” get revived as a term in the first Black Lives Matter sequence?
Raphael: No it was the 90s, from Critical Resistance.
“The thing that is meant by “abolitionism” in the world today is essentially an institutional way to substitute the self-activity of poor people with policy reform.“
Scheherazade: In my opinion, the thing that is meant by “abolitionism” in the world today is essentially an institutional way to substitute the self-activity of poor people with policy reform. So it’s the idea that you can defund the police, you can abolish mandatory minimums, you can do these policy reforms. In the absence of upheaval, you can fine-tune elements of the carceral state such that they make racialized existence, and thus, so the mythos goes, insurrectional activity more likely to take hold, more likely to work, more likely to succeed, or something like that. This is the most radical version of that actually, this is maybe what people like Joy James would say, which is, to take the most charitable reading. I think it’s disconnected from any historical lineage, it’s disconnected in its self-understanding to abolitionism as it existed leading up to the US Civil War.
Raphael: Whereas Black nationalism, at its core, understands that the United States is a country that fundamentally is not for them. And they need something else. This is not a reformist position, it is, even if it is one that I don’t completely agree with, a revolutionary position.
Q: Just because we’re skirting around this topic right now, and it’s timely, can you all comment on Angela Davis, and explain her recent appearance in Atlanta?*
Scheherazade: Angela Davis, as has been made very clear by Joy James, her long-time comrade, knowingly worked with the CIA throughout the 90s to secure funding, by way of Gloria Steinem, who is an agent of the CIA. And Angela knew that she was helping to funnel money from the CIA into Critical Resistance. And Critical Resistance is the organization that we could say first popularized this framework of abolitionism after the Civil War, in the current era. And then when Elaine Brown, who was the chairperson of the Black Panther Party while Huey was in prison…Elaine Brown was dating an FBI agent, and knew it. When she wrote her memoir, which is called “A Taste of Power”, she doesn’t mention it. And Angela Davis wrote the introduction to it, and she didn’t mention it. She did a speaking tour for it, and blocked people from attending that she knew would bring it up, including former Panthers. And Joy James makes this very clear in an essay that she wrote called “Airbrushing Revolution for the Sake of Abolition” that came out in 2020. These are all very significant, it’s important to understand the backdrop, because Angela Davis is very held up by institutions as the voice of Black power. She was never a member of the Black Panther Party. And the leading intellectuals of Black power as it was really occurring, exist only as images. The writings of Huey Newton are never discussed or disseminated; the writings of Eldridge Cleaver are never discussed or disseminated; the writings of George Jackson are never discussed or disseminated, and in fact Angela Davis owns all those rights—
Q: What the fuck?!
Scheherazade: Yes. I can go on about this, but—in 2020, when the revolt began, a bunch of mysterious facebook pages began to push “Are Prisons Obsolete?” as the book that people should read. Happily, Joy James wrote this hit piece on her long-time comrade that kind of stunted that, and then I think “Blood in My Eye” became more widely read, the George Jackson book that is better. I don’t think that Angela Davis is an absolute enemy or something, she’s extremely low on the list of people to hate. But, there’s something very odd about her presence in the symbolic organization of the memory of Black power, for someone who was never a member of the vanguard of that movement, the Black Panther Party.
Anyway, so, she came to Atlanta, while 8 people are still being denied bond for their attendance at a music festival and 3 others are being held from previous arrests—all these people are being held in jail and people being charged for domestic terrorism—the city council that has the power to cancel Cop City and refuses to, recently declared March 24 “Angela Davis Day”. And she came, and she received this honor. I think it’s important to understand how Atlanta politics work and US politics in general. It’s clearly part of the system of a racial clientele state that gives a black face to the white corporate power structure. And this is a deeper level of it, that’s very odd—she didn’t mention Cop City or any of this at all at the time, but attendees in the crowd starting chanting “Stop Cop City” as the event was ending. She has since mentioned it in the most lukewarm way possible, describing that she is against Cop City because it’s going to teach cops to police using guns. And so she developed a very policy-friendly version of a critique that falls directly in the laps of the Democratic Party who she is essentially a shill for.*
Raphael: And she fails to mention the 11 people still in jail, even with her statement. You should just know, for context: she gets paid tens of thousands of dollars for speaking events, and she’s a tenured professor, and she’s probably, I would guess, in her early 70s. She is comfortably in the 1% of the income bracket of the United States. Her class position is pretty clear. And what made her famous and on the FBI most wanted list is nothing she did. It’s that her bodyguard, George Jackson’s little brother, Johnathan, did a heroic but failed attempt at freeing his brother from prison. Because, allegedly, she gave a 16-year-old guns to defend her, is why she became the face of the movement—it’s nothing she did. It’s things people around her did.
Q: I had no idea.
Raphael: Her doctorate is boring as hell. It’s like not even radical, just nonsense about Hegel.
Scheherazade: I also take it as a diss, from the Atlanta city government with its past. Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael, is from here. And so is Jamil Al-Amin, formerly H. Rap Brown, he’s still in prison. They’re from here. But, they are actually a part of organized Black power. There’s no day for them. There’s a day for Angela Davis, who’s not from here, who’s from Alabama originally. I think of that as some sort of weird diss.
Q: That’s brutal. I saw that footage and was like, wow, that’s very offensive.
We should probably pivot back to our list of other questions. Let’s bring it back to the day-to-day…Y’all have been engaged in this struggle really intensely. What kind of every-day life are you having? And what does that look like with regard to subsistence, accommodation, safety, confrontation…what’s it like to actually live in this struggle?
Raphael: All of us presently here are in the very low income bracket in the United States. I am part of the downwardly-mobile white millennials. I try to work as little as possible for as much as possible, so that I can have a good life, and a lot of that involves political struggle and participation in DIY culture. And just hanging out with people.
“I am part of the downwardly-mobile white millennials. I try to work as little as possible for as much as possible, so that I can have a good life, and a lot of that involves political struggle and participation in DIY culture. And just hanging out with people.“
Q: Hanging out is part of what makes it what it is—encounter and conversation begets friendship and trust.
Raphael: Yes.
Myra: I know very few people who have a full-time job. I do have some friends that do that, but, most of the people I associate with don’t have that type of structure. I did for four months, and it was really brutal.
Raphael: It’s inhuman.
Q: What kind of work were you doing?
Myra: I was building treehouses. It was really awkward, because it was when the first treehouses were being built in the forest. I was in the backyard of a mansion in north Atlanta, building a treehouse for $18/hour. It was for a 3-year-old, a $30,000 treehouse. I’ve never had a car that was worth an eighth of that. Not even a tenth of that.
<laughter>
S: Living in Atlanta has been the longest period of my adult life that I’ve been able to work as little as I have. I think that’s in part because comrades have houses and have been generous with letting me stay in them. I lived in the forest for some time while that was possible, and bought a bus from a friend, had it parked outside a friend’s house. So, a combination of being able to move between the forest and the city where people have crafted a life in common, has allowed me to work like three hours a week, basically, and dedicate most of my time to the movement and music.
Q: What’s the experience of rising costs of living, here in Atlanta?
Raphael: Atlanta inflated 18% in costs last year, which is more than any other metropolis in the country. That’s not just rent, that’s also just inflation in general.
Scheherazade: Currently, Atlanta’s undergoing a rapid increase in the cost of living. Gentrification is the word that people use, which I feel describes a different period of urban renewal, in which every piece of dense dwelling on earth, even in the global south, is becoming more expensive. I think something else is happening, which is not gentrification, it’s actually capitalization, where the big industrial actors are afraid of market volatility and are moving from exploiting labor as a way to make money and are simply just trying to extract more rent as a more stable investment of their money. This is a huge aside, but it feels strongly relevant, and does explain why the ecological concerns become extremely acute and will increasingly take on a social character. Where things that maybe affected some farmers before affect entire housing blocks now. Or parts of towns or cities or metropolises—megalopolises, you know. I think that’s a new paradigm, where more struggles will have to deal with things that have to do with what markets see as real estate. Like land, or rivers, or watersheds.
Raphael: We’re not a city like some coastal cities, some of which have largely emptied out the population of people who are in or near poverty into the suburbs. Over 20% of Atlanta is below the poverty line, and I don’t know the statistic but I would assume another 20% also earn less than $30,000 a year but more than $12,500. At the same time, though, we are not like certain other coastal cities that still have a high poor population, but still have some semblance of social democracy, or a welfare state. People here are extremely desperate in a lot of ways. There’s probably tens of thousands of young to middle-aged black and white men who just put up drywall sometimes, and then also have to sell drugs sometimes, or do other things.
Scheherazade: I think it’s important to say probably, some people had a deeper inoculation into organizing through the grassroots Left, also through leftwing organizing structures or movements, and I can’t speak for them but I’ll say that we’ve worked really hard to avoid the kind of compulsory urgency that attaches itself to activist campaigns. We talked a lot in the beginning about how this is probably going to take a long time, and I don’t think that many people I’m close to spend all day every day doing hard or rote tasks. Although it’s not just all fun, we do make sacrifices. I work on tasks that aren’t always fun, or that are labor-intensive, fairly often, several days a week or even a few hours every day sometimes. So, it’s not just a constant grind, and it’s not highly unenjoyable either. Or maybe, I’m an asshole, and for some people, so that hundreds of us can deal with it like how I do, there’s a handful of people who are just constantly grinding. I think that’s probably true actually. Like, the jail support people especially.
Myra: But there’s also a lot of room to come in and out of organizing structures, or whatever it is that’s happening. You can be there, or not be there. People go on a vacation, and take breaks, and then come back and know their role and do the things that they enjoy doing.
S: Yeah. I kind of had that inoculation through the activist Left, pre-2020. I became very disillusioned with that, realized that was bullshit, and then came here and was inspired by the informality of things. Sometimes it does get exhausting, because, it’s like, are we hanging out, or is this a meeting? But it also just allows for more creativity. You can figure out what you want to plug into, when you want to plug into that, and follow your own rhythm. Maybe sometimes I do really want to grind on this thing, but next month I’m going to go out of town and not do anything.
B: I had connections with people in Atlanta before this struggle, but I’ve mostly moved here as a result of it. I feel like I have a little bit of a different work/life balance than maybe people who are here who have other things going on. I go through phases of each day just starting the day with no idea what I’m going to do aside from maybe some accumulated obligations. But throughout the day there’s so many different people who ask me to do things, and I just kind of take a little bit of each thing that I want to do. I just have this sense that I’m just voluntarily ceding some of my autonomy or free choice in what I’m gonna do, go with the flow. A lot of it has to do with certain resources that I have. I’m borrowing a truck, so a lot of the things that I do are just determined by what the truck needs to do. But also it does really feel like there’s enough flexibility because there’s enough different people willing to do all the different things that I can go from that mode of being into another one where I just very specifically know what I want to work on and I just flat out refuse almost all requests for assistance on other people’s projects. I’ll be like, nah, I’m on strike from driving for the next week. I’m gonna do something else. Pass the keys off.
Q: Can you talk some about the jail support infrastructure?
Raphael: The movement would have fallen apart without a very robust anti-repression infrastructure. We have very high bail here. Bail is ransom by the state to get out of jail. Unless it’s a federal crime, you generally don’t have high-quality public defenders, so you have to get a lawyer. If you’re stuck in jail for a little bit, you need money to spend at the commissary, to buy nicer things in jail.
Myra: Like a long-sleeved shirt.
Raphael: Yes. And there’s a 24/7 jail support hotline that a team of thankless people rotate with the phone. And this infrastructure informally existed for a while, and formalized in 2016 in the lead-up to an antiracist mobilization. And, the infrastructure itself had like $20,000 in assets until 2020, where in the first two weeks of the Uprising it went viral along with many other jail support funds around the country, and amassed enough money. It’s actually public now, I’m allowed to say now, finally…less than $3.5 million.
Q: What?!
Raphael: This is low. The Minnesota Freedom Fund, which only bails people out, does not help with lawyers or anything else, got $40 million. But anyway, because of that, and because 900 people were arrested in Atlanta in 2020, the infrastructure had to scale massively. And I actually find it hard to work with it because it’s too bureaucratic for me, and for many people. But it gets the job done, and is a thankless thing that a lot of us participate in when we can, and that some thankless people do all the time.
Myra: For some people, it’s their way to engage in this struggle. For a lot of jail support people, that is just what they do. It is extremely thankless in many ways, but, for some people it’s just how they engage in what they love to do for the struggle. Which is awesome.
Q: Would anyone be able to talk more about the repression? And give context for the domestic terrorism charges, and the ramp up in December, and the murder?
“Part of what movements need to succeed is an understanding that repression is a part of struggles. It’s not outside of it, it’s not something that’s avoidable.“
Scheherazade: I want to let someone else talk about the repression, but I do want to say that part of what movements need to succeed—and this is something that historically lots of anti-authoritarian politics forget—is an understanding that repression is a part of struggles. It’s not outside of it, it’s not something that’s occurring that’s avoidable—like if you’re really clever you can avoid repression. I think that people think that if you’re really careful, or if you’re really smart, you can avoid it. This kind of dynamic has been very divisive within movements in the last century, maybe longer. But in fact, the form of the repression models itself on the form of resistance, and they’re both immutable and in fact are the motors of history. All of the good and bad things that have happened have been the struggle between colliding ideas of happiness, and they structure one another. If you don’t have an idea that there will be repression, you don’t actually fully understand the movement you’re in. And if you can’t model what that repression will be, you are playing with one eye closed. I feel that that’s really important to understand because a lot of people in movements imagine that every time there’s repression there’s been a kind of failure, or they imagine that they could be so clever that there’s never a reaction, but I think that’s naive and it means you don’t actually yet have a political idea about how the world can change, you only have an idea based on the hope that there’s no one fighting against you.
Myra: I’m curious—were you surprised the first time you heard “domestic terrorism” charges? Like how it hit you?
Scheherazade: I was very surprised that it took so long. I thought there would be domestic terrorism charges way before.
S: They started calling us domestic terrorists in the spring of 2022.
Scheherazade: On May 21st, 2022. Generally.
Raphael: For context, there’s been a little over 90 arrests over the course of the Stop Cop City movement. 18 of them have had their charges dropped. There are 41 domestic terrorism charges, one person facing two separate ones from different alleged incidents. But, for example, someone who’s alleged to have just flyered a church of a business executive—they were not charged with domestic terrorism, and this was before the charges started, but, at the initial hearing, the prosecutor referred to that person to their lawyer as a member of a terrorist organization. Which is an absurd thing.
Q: That is an absurd thing.
S: And this is around the time that they started trying to set up the justification for their disproportionate use of force and violence by creating this highly dubious story that someone throwing a rock at a work truck fired a gun at the work truck. Using random bullet casings in the area as evidence and publishing this story all over the news.
Raphael: The Homeowners Association (HOA) president of Boulder Walk is on the new task force that’s supposed to consult the mayor on how to build Cop City, and, he’s the one who went and gave that press conference, he’s the one who made up this story.
Q: And this all led to 41 domestic terrorism charges…
Myra: It started with 6, it was a raid. There had been roughly 40 arrests before that point, at various demos and in the woods. But the repression really escalated with the raid in December of 2022. On December 13, 2022 there was a raid, and they destroyed a bunch of things and arrested six people. Five people on one day, and then one on the next—it was a two-day raid. And they were all charged with between seven and nine charges each, including domestic terrorism. They were released on bond, which was not that high, from $12,000 to $40,00.
S: This was also after an appeal. They were denied bond which I feel like was really shocking, it was the first time in the movement that anyone had been denied bond.
Myra: That’s right. And then, there was another raid in January. In between that time, people had gone back to the forest. There was bigger infrastructure built, and a really big rave on New Year’s Eve, a big celebration. And, what day was it in January?
Scheherazade: January 18th.
Myra: January 18th—oh wait was it earlier?
Scheherazade: The day that Tort was killed.
B: The 18th.
Myra: Right ok. So then they raided the woods. And then they murdered our friend. And they continued to raid, and arrested 6 people, and in the morning they arrested the 7th person who had been in a tree all night. So there had been raids before December, but they hadn’t…and with the raid in January they continued the domestic terrorism charges. And then, at the protest on the 21st of January, six more people were arrested. And they were also charged a bunch of charges, and that was when we saw the highest bail. Two people were granted bond, and the other four were not. But, the two granted bond were granted $355,000 bond each. Which, with fees and everything, is almost $400,000.
Raphael: Which if you do pay it in full, you can theoretically get that money back at the end of the trial, at the end of everything which would be several years. Or, you can go through a “bondsman”, where you will pay them a percentage, usually like ten percent, up front, and you will never get that money back.
Myra: But you also have to sign off your house! The bondsman will pay the $400,000 and take your house as collateral. And then if you don’t pay it they’ll come get you with a bounty hunter.
Raphael: We live in dystopia.
Scheherazade: It’s the Wild West.
Myra: But anyway, that was pretty much it. And then there was the Week of Action, in the forest. Between the time of the murder and the Week of Action, it didn’t feel great to go in the woods. The police had began to occupy it…there were like 30 police present on the other side of the forest, every day, costing them $42,000 a day to secure the area to begin construction. People really weren’t there in any kind of numbers. There were events happening, but it felt pretty tense. You felt watched. I felt violated to be in the woods where I once felt like it was a place away from cameras and the world. So you just felt watched. I felt watched. And then, during the music festival in the first days of the Week of Action, 23 people were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism.
Raphael: Another 20 or so were detained, but ultimately released. And all the 20 people who were ultimately released had Atlanta or area addresses listed on their drivers licenses. Everyone who was arrested did not. They had drivers licenses and addresses elsewhere.
Q: The state has been relying really heavily on this “outside agitator” narrative, and it’s interesting to see how people have responded to that by repeating that it’s not a local struggle.
Bud: All throughout this movement, there’s been a lot of action around protecting different public land, whether that be parks or homeless encampments. And there are proposals like Cop City other places. You can’t think of it just as a local struggle. Also in the movement there have been shifts in the way that some of the people giving speeches at protests talk about outside agitators, they’re like—yeah, there are definitely people from outside of Atlanta coming here, and we invite everyone. There’s just so much obvious hypocrisy in the way that GBI, APF, etc tries to spin a public narrative about outside agitators. It just allows people to see that hypocrisy and then to double down on it more. Which I think could have really positive effects for the future of movements in general in this country.
Scheherazade: In addition, there have been other forms of repression. There’s been a number of door knocks around the country, and locally there’s been feds calling people. There’s been drones flying over people’s houses or over fundraiser events for the movement, or helicopters, things that are typical of repression in general. Contact from authorities. Things that are not quite an arrest, or quite an indictment, but are still repression.
Myra: Also, public locales that were hosting safe, informational spaces where people who didn’t want to go into the woods or risk any type of charges, they have been harassed, with raids and fines…
Scheherazade: One of them is a church. They had a bunch of stuff destroyed, and then the church was inundated with an abnormal amount of code violations.
Raphael: Threats to shut down a queer youth homeless shelter that operates out of the church…
Scheherazade: …As a byproduct of their support for the movement. Also a part of the repression that is of a higher level is that the mayor’s office has been mobilizing their clientele activists to attend meetings and to go visit non-profit organizations and labor unions and other groups and politicians that have mobilized support for the movement and to visit them and to try to convince them to boycott the movement and to not go to rallies, to withdraw their support, things like this. This is a kind of preemptive control that is only possible within the kind of clientele structure of a place like Atlanta or other places…throughout Latin America of course clientelism is the governing logic, or like in Lebanon, the sectarianism is a kind of clientele politics.
Q: I know or have heard most of this stuff, but being in this room hearing you all talk about it so matter-of-fact…how does it feel to be talking about it? It’s so fucking heavy. Like…are you ok?
<laughter>
“My threshold has changed dramatically since the murder. Things that would normally be really terrible are just the most minor inconvenience, I’m not even concerned about it.“
B: My threshold has changed dramatically since the murder. Things that would normally be really terrible are just the most minor inconvenience, I’m not even concerned about it. Somebody accidentally drove a car into the house I’m living in and kind of broke it. And literally when I was told about it, I was just like, I’m not even concerned about that, I’ll think about it tomorrow, there’s too much going on.
Raphael: A good anecdote on it is that, one time a friend who doesn’t live in Georgia called me, livid, because some anarchists were spreading conspiracy theories on the internet about spaces in Atlanta and alleged cults and stuff, and I’m like, hey, I can’t be mad with you right now, I’m outside of the jail waiting for my roommate to get out. I’m really sorry this happened, probably tomorrow I’ll be a bit more angry about it, and we’ll talk then.
Scheherazade: Many times, in the past three or six months especially, when police are chasing people in the forest, they have pivoted from yelling simply, “Get on the ground”, which is their favorite refrain across the US, to, “Stop or I’ll shoot”.
Myra: “I’ve got real bullets.”
Scheherazade: Yeah “I’ve got real bullets”, “I’m gonna put a bullet in you”, things like this. But especially “Stop or I’ll shoot.” Probably many people, including myself, have had a cop yell “Stop or I’ll shoot.” That’s also a form of advanced repression that probably people in other parts of the world would think is very alarming, and other parts of the country, maybe people who aren’t in the movement as well would think that’s alarming. I think it’s alarming. Not actually, I’m not alarmed by it because I’m used to it, but…people get used to lots of repression, and it’s a form of internalized repression that we’re not outraged every time they do this. Repression affects us. The fact that we become more cynical about our own rights is actually how we facilitate the escalating repression against us in this way where we expect only brutality and carnage to come from the state, in a way that also allows them to do that. And I think the lack of proportionate response to the murder of an anarchist in the forest by the police is part of that. There were definitely some actions and social or political consequence for that, but not properly proportional and I think it’s because a lot of people in our society believe, “Yeah, ok, the police kill people who are fighting for justice, therefore they will kill you.” This becomes more true the more we believe it.
This is a form of de-radicalization that people in the far-Left participate in by spreading resignation around things like this. It seems more radical to believe, “Of course the state are thugs they’re gonna kill you”. But I think there’s something deeply wise about the hysterical, shocked reaction of people who just cannot accept that the police killed someone: let’s do something now, they violated my rights, you know? These people often do the most radical actions…this is why I think that radicals and anarchists often contribute at the rear of movements. It’s because they don’t even believe that they have rights. They don’t even expect to not just be killed.
Myra: That makes me think of the recent court hearings, where the prosecutor said, “We arrested this person because they have the jail support number written on their arm, and therefore that presumes guilt.” And I think that’s another form of repression, these narratives that they say in the court, which is the logical framework by which they do everything.
Bud: And specifically a bond hearing, where there isn’t time to argue the facts on whether that’s true, they just get to kind of say. And it just sticks in people’s heads, and that’s all it’s meant for.
Raphael: It’s probably relevant to explain the conditions that the eleven people inside are currently dealing with. 8 of them are at Dekalb County Jail, which houses people in Atlanta and in a nearby majority-Black suburb. In 2019 there was a small but fierce struggle against the conditions at this jail. What they’re dealing with is mold in the walls, in the food, wastewater routinely coming out of the ceiling, depending on where you are in this facility—always out of the toilets, but also depending on where you are, from the ceiling or from the ground. There’s no social programs, there’s no outside time, it’s a very bleak, bad place.
The others are at Fulton County Jail, which houses for Atlanta and some other suburbs, called Rice Street commonly, but only one person is there. And that’s worse. It’s a worse facility, also incredibly dangerous there. At both facilities, a large segment of the populace are there for years, pre-trial, which is quasi-illegal. Certain segments of those facilities are controlled by criminal organizations that are very anti-social. Not a great place to be.
Three of them are at a different facility via Rice Street, called Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC). Most people are not there very long. It was built in the lead-up to the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. The City of Atlanta gave homeless people bus tickets wherever they wanted to go, one-way. And then the rest who didn’t take that, they swept them up, literally, and put them in ACDC during the summer Olympics. And it stayed as kind of a place you go to for very low-level misdemeanors and zoning laws. And there was a small struggle against that in 2018, when around the country there was an activist movement against ICE, that had encampments because some ICE prisoners were there, and that was successful at getting ICE detainees out of that jail. That facility is objectively better than the other two, but it’s also absurd because…their food. Because they’re technically Rice Street prisoners, food has to be driven there three times a day to them, and it often comes completely wrecked.
Myra: They’re obligated to have warm meals, for two meals a day I think, but because the meals are driven there they just come cold. They’re cold and fused together by steam under plastic wrap, and it’s just one big congealed blob.
Raphael: You’re entitled to two meals per day, but they could be at any time. Sometimes you receive two meals at 3am. And then it’s your job to ration that. But at Dekalb County Jail, where 8 of them are, even after the cycles of struggle that happened there in 2019, there’s still definitely pockets within the jail that are seriously combative, when there’s outside support, like noise demos or sometimes even if there’s large vigils. At a recent jail vigil/noise demo for the people who were locked up there, there were cops on a roof, and two prisoners smashed out jail windows by punching them, and threw blankets that were on fire at the police officers. Unfortunately they did not connect, they missed.
Myra: But a bush caught on fire.
Raphael: But when I saw this, I was only shocked about the fire as a new innovation,
Myra: The fire going out the window.
Raphael: Yeah that’s a new innovation. Again, it’s been a protracted struggle at the Dekalb County Jail, but when I heard there were windows smashed I was like, yeah that’s normal. One time there were like 120 people outside the jail, and 12 windows got smashed in a coordinated fashion. So when I heard there was two I was like, ah, no big deal.
Scheherazade: The logical next step would be to throw guards out the window.
Raphael: The windows are not big enough to fit humans.
Q: Not in one piece.
<laughter>
Q: Just to circle back to the domestic terrorism charges, do any of you feel equipped to give a larger political context about the rhetoric on domestic terrorism in the US?
Scheherazade: Terrorism has a specific place symbolically in US politics because of 9/11, but also legally it covers a larger range of things compared to many other countries. After 9/11, there was the Patriot Act, and a law called the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act); basically both of these laws strongly reduced the amount of freedom and privacy of people who are in the legal territory of the United States. It sharply reduced those rights, and sharply expanded the budget for “counter-terrorism”. Which is a dystopian phrase that the State Department developed—they use “anti-terrorism” in other countries, but in the US they say “counter-terrorism”. So… they’re doing terrorism, according to their framework.
Terrorism, politically/legally in the US, is the destruction of vital infrastructure of the country, which normally referred to things like hydroelectric dams, water treatment facilities, power grids, things that possibly millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people rely on for their biological existence, or for social reproduction in general; and would not refer to things such as government buildings, corporate property, things like that. That’s in the past. But, over the years, the interpretation of terrorism has continued to broaden more and more and more. Essentially, the framework for terrorism politically is no longer being strictly attached to Wahhabism/al-Qaeda inspired jihadis, and is increasingly being targeted against the extreme Right. Actually, the majority of people who are targeted for domestic terrorism in the United States are people in the extreme Right: neo-Nazis, anti-abortion fanatics, etc. And that’s for doing things like shooting electrical sub-stations, attempting to poison people with ricin, or these kinds of deranged things. And to tie this back to the 1996 Olympics: the 1996 Olympics games in Atlanta were actually bombed by Eric Robert Rudolf, who was an anti-abortion extremist, just as an aside.
But, after the Charleston massacre, the shooting at the Black church by Dylann Roof, who was directly inspired by many white supremacist shootings around the world, Georgia passed a law called HB452 which is the Georgia domestic terrorism law. The Dylann Roof shooting was in 2015…and the Pulse Nightclub shooting was in Orlando, Florida in 2017. House Bill 452 is the Georgia domestic terrorism law which was adopted partially because the old Georgia domestic terrorism law had a quota for deaths. And so, if ten people had not died, it would not be terrorism. The new law was kind of embraced by the institutional Left and the Right as well, but especially the institutional Left, as a way to say, wow that’s crazy we shouldn’t have this quota; it should simply be a certain kind of action to actually remove consequences from the consideration, and re-center motivation and tactics. So it makes a highly technical, highly precise definition, which really hones in on this vital infrastructure component, and government facilities. So it broadens it a little bit, but no one has been charged under House Bill 452 until now.
Which is why I think Sherry Boston, the district attorney for Dekalb County, is actually just a social climber who is making career moves and does not intend to convict a single person on this, but intends to overturn HB452 in the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court of the United States could be interested in that because it’s currently controlled by the Right, and the Right is interested in overturning domestic terrorism laws because of January 6, when there was the kind-of riot at the US capital, resulting in the death of Ashley Babbitt and four others as Q-Anon protestors attempted a kind of fake, symbolic coup-de-tat in order to defend the presidency of former US president Donald Trump.
The FBI is not overseeing this, because they’re currently targeting the far-Right as their bogeyman for who does terrorism. But the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigations), which is controlled by Republicans, are trying to target “antifa”, or like, however it is they conceive of the movement. It feels partially like there’s an inter-departmental feud about the definition of domestic terrorism. All of this is designed to go up to the Supreme Court. That’s conjecture, though, that last part.
Q: We’re short on time, but have a last question: can y’all talk about the role of music and raves in the forest and in this movement? Both politically and also experientially?
Myra: Was the first rave in the woods on the creek?
Raphael: Yes.
Scheherazade: Wow. What an incredible experience. 500 people.
Myra: Yeah. It was amazing. We had a rave on the creek. There’s this one part where the embankment is kind of big, and it’s sandy, and when the water level is down there’s this smaller crossing…the shoreline is always changing…there was a little bridge across so there was a fire on one side, and then the dance party was just in the creek, on this sandy bank. It felt like we were at a beach.
Raphael: If it rains, there’s water there. We were in the creek bed.
Myra: Yeah it’s a shallow part that becomes a beach when it’s not raining. It was the first Week of Action, I think 50 people were camping in the woods, and there was a 45 minute hike through the woods from the encampment, a really nice hike, to get to the rave.
Raphael: There were lights to guide you, and you could hear the boom boom boom
Myra: Yeah. And this was a time when there was no repression.
Scheherazade: There was no repression.
Myra: Nothing had happened yet.
Scheherazade: This is before the Left had joined the movement.
Myra: And so the idea at that point was: people need to come to the woods.
“If anyone’s going to care, people need to have a stake in the woods, they need to come here and they need to experience it, to feel and hear it”
Myra: No one had been here. We thought, if anyone’s going to care, people need to have a stake in the woods, they need to come here and they need to experience it, to feel and hear it, and camping was part of that. Obviously a lot more people came to the rave… And one of the things that I noticed from the second Week of Action and the second rave, was that there were ravers who brought tents. People were camped intentionally, but the ravers who came just set up their tents off-trail. People wanted to camp.
Scheherazade: No one had even been here.
Raphael: Also, the first Week of Action was during the roaring June days, the lowest COVID has ever been.
Myra: Oh right, yeah! People were so excited.
Raphael: A month prior, there was a one-band show inside at a venue that was about to be demolished. It was one band, and less than 100 people went. Then we had the first proper show in Atlanta in a long time, there were four bands. There were 300 people in a space that could could comfortably fit 80. And eventually the police came, not because of the movement, probably because of a noise complaint.
Myra: And why don’t we know? Why don’t we know why the cops came?… Because they left.
Raphael: Oh right! Half of the crowd stayed inside and moshed, and the other half ran outside and just gave pure grief. Not just like “Fuck 12” but also targeted, mean things to say, about their lack of hair, and also just throwing rocks and bottles at them. And they quickly left.
Myra: I think it was the rocks.
S: And hundreds of punks.
Myra: And they only had one or two cop cars.
Raphael: Since then, music has continued to be a vital part of it. As I said, the base of support for the movement is DIY music subculture, and for context, that’s not just punk and hardcore, that’s also hip-hop, it’s also various genres of electronic music, house, and indie rock, jungle, and noise…And there’s shows all over the country that are fundraiser shows for the movement, and there are shows here all the time of all these genres, some taking place in the woods, some taking place elsewhere. The two big apexes of this: during the fourth Week of Action there was a 3-day music festival in the forest, probably 1,000 people attended over the three days. During the most recent Week of Action, there was a 2-day music festival that the cops ultimately interrupted with their raid, but probably 1,200-1,500 people attended in the far west corner of the RC field, which is an open area with not a lot of trees but is nestled into a little peninsula of the tree-line. That’s where the South River Music Festival was. The most popular artists by Spotify metrics had a little over 2 million monthly listeners, and others had dozens. It was great.
Myra: I can’t remember if it was the second or third Week of Action…the music was really great, there was a multi-genre show, and afterwards people just set up and did shows. I heard it referred to multiple times as “the last remaining DIY venue”, in the forest. This patch of woods became known as the Living Room.
“I think for a lot of anarchists, they consciously or maybe subconsciously separate their political and social lives. We have made an extensive effort to not do that.”
Bud: I think for a lot of anarchists, they consciously or maybe subconsciously separate their political and social lives. We have made an extensive effort to not do that. There was a really intentional effort to go outside of thinking about just purely identity politics but also all of the different subcultures that we want to be a part of this movement, that we want to encourage people to be a part of it. It even goes beyond different music subcultures, it goes to different factions of people. There was a big intention toward that, but also people are just genuinely a part of these subcultures to begin with. So it wasn’t forced, and it never felt forced, it felt really natural and beautiful because of that.
Scheherazade: We need new ideas, and we get them from music. I think a lot of the struggles of the past ten years have expressed a shared intelligence globally: that large sections of unorganized humanity can spontaneously flood city centers, plazas, shopping districts, over a single grievance, and that a single thrust of mobilization can create new social forms capable of contesting other indignities. That’s basically the idea that humanity has cycled through, a lot of times in hundreds of countries, beginning with Tunisia and Egypt, and then going to a lot of other places too. There’s other ideas that reacted to that idea, including smaller, less ambitious “territorial” ideas, or “site-based” initiatives that give up the idea of regime change and replace them with these other segmentary ideas that make a lot of other things possible. All these ideas have expressed themselves in a lot of different ways, and I really believe that we need new ideas. Because those ideas didn’t work. Or they worked, but then they produced civil wars that people couldn’t end, or new forms of dictatorship that were not desirable, or they didn’t even lead to substantial reforms let alone the transformation of daily lived experiences.
People need to find new ideas, you can’t find new ideas just in the realm of thinking based on reflection and idea-making. Politics can’t help you produce new political ideas. So, music—we’re really connected to musical things, but people need to be able to come up with ideas. And they’re going to have to reach outside of politics for that, somehow, in earnest. Not as a cynical appropriation of medieval theater or whatever…And so I think the movement is really offering a lot to us, partially because of the experiences we’re having with each other and because people are giving us these musical experiences as well.
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