from Twitter
Submission
Wolf = Humility
Indigenous Day of Rage
“We will need each other to make sure that the flames, if they were to come, clear the area that we will live in together. We will need to clear it of the fuel that would end up repeating the problems we are currently having. We will need to make sure that the seeds, nutrients and soil are scattered beyond our ability to control.” Aragorn
We don’t just want a cease fire, we want the Right of Return for all Palestinian people, for water to flow, and the traditions to stay alive. We can’t get back the countless lives lost, but we can honor and avenge them. And we will.
For the end of the struggle that is settler colonialism everywhere. Where the land is stolen, consent violated, the old ways forgotten – let it burn.
We hope that every colonizer who robs the lives and dignity of the land and the people on it understands that their great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren’s children are not going to be here because of their violence and indeterminent destruction.
We will still be here fighting for the next seven generations, but we will never forget the slaughter, and we will remember to make sure those grandchildren stay afraid of all that is wild.
The united states government now “recognizes” indigenous people’s day alongside columbus day. we must make this impossible to reconcile. We will remain illegible to them, and unknowable to all but each other and the stars above, the water below, and all that of the earth fighting back. We call out to the brave and the humble – all that is striving towards life, while defying management, capture, and domestication with a strength they could never know.
find the connections, funders, manufacturers, advisors, politicians, gentrifiers, and all enemies of the people and the earth. you know who they are.
find some friends and haunt those motherfuckers ghosts
from Unity of Fields
“On the morning of October 10, an autonomous group targeted the home of Gavin Kenneally, co-founder and CEO of Ghost Robotics in Philadelphia. The group painted “Funded By Genocide” across his garage, and “I Make Killer Dogs” on the sidewalk, threw paint at the door and ring camera, and smashed windows. We firmly say — we don’t want your dog shit in Philadelphia! And we don’t want it anywhere!
Gavin’s home is currently listed for sale for a whopping $1.9 million dollars. While his autonomous robots are shipped across the world to patrol and surveil Palestinians, Gavin awaits the sale of his lavish home he’s made with dirty money.
Other manufacturers of autonomous robots have stated their commitment to not arming robot dogs, but Ghost Robotics has positioned themselves as the dealer for these weapons. They clearly have no shame or concern about their robot dogs being used to surveil and kill people.
No genocide profiteer should sit comfortably in their home — we commit to draining funds from Gavin, to reminding him that his robot dogs are agents of U.S. imperialism, and to closing down Ghost Robotics.
Until all people are able to live safely and freely in the place they call home, we commit to fighting for our collective liberation.”
from Mainstream Media
Indego is suffering from a dramatic upsurge in vandalism that forced the company to remove five stations, mostly in South Philadelphia.
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Philadelphia’s bike-share system, Indego, is suffering a wave of vandalism and theft so intense that it has had to remove five stations.
“Since July, we have had unprecedented level of vandalism to our stations,” said Nate Bowman-Johnston, Indego’s general manager. “It’s just a massive scale that we’re dealing with at this point.”
Thieves have been physically breaking bikes out of the docking stations where they are locked up waiting for paying users. In some cases, the damage to Indego’s infrastructure rendered entire stations inoperable.
Stations have been removed at 16th and Wolf Streets, Fourth Street and Oregon Avenue, 24th and Jackson Streets, 57th Street and Westminster Avenue, and 21st Street and Washington Avenue.
“South Philly’s been the epicenter of the activity for some reason,” Bowman-Johnston said. There are also some stations where only one or a handful of docks have been affected.
Indego is working with law enforcement on the issue. While there have been no arrests, Bowman-Johnston says there are several active investigations.
He said Indego is waiting for parts and plans to reinstall all of the lost stations in the next two months. “The goal is to reinstall every station,” he said.
Stations outfitted with the latest equipment have proven more vulnerable to this kind of theft, while the latching mechanisms on Indego’s more antiquated stations are more resilient. The 16th and Wolf station, for example, will likely be replaced with tougher, older equipment the company already has in its inventory.
Bowman-Johnston said that despite this summer’s setbacks, Indego ridership is up 20% year-over-year, and that this week it hit 1 million trips for the year so far. The network plans to expand into new neighborhoods soon.
Vandalism and theft have long plagued bike-share systems, and images of bikes or scooters floating in rivers or piled in parks occasionally go viral. But while the North American Bikeshare & Scootershare Association (NABSA) does not have data on the number of incidents, such attacks are not unique to Philadelphia and are less frequent than industry experts initially projected.
“When bike share and scooter share first started [in 2008 and 2009], the general consensus was that there would be a ton of vandalism,” said Laura Mallonee, membership and engagement director with NABSA. “But unlike other street infrastructure, we don’t necessarily see as much as we expected.”
*This story has been updated with the full list of shuttered stations.
from North Shore
Read the full text, including visuals, online as a PDF.
Find the full text ready for printing as an imposed PDF.
Since the commencement of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, millions around the world have taken to the streets in support of Palestine against the genocidal Zionist entity. We are, globally, in an unprecedented moment of anti-imperialist mobilisation, which threatens not only the Zionist occupation but the colonial powers that uphold it.
This text was written through the summer and early autumn of 2024 from Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory (so-called Southern Ontario, Canada), where people, many new to the left, have been facing intensified violence and harassment from both police and Zionists. Protests are regularly met with arrests and other attacks, which have created a climate of fear among attendees and organisers.
At the same time, that fear, combined with a disconnect from previous generations of struggle and an often-unchallenged fear of militancy, has led to practices that end up putting our comrades in more danger. This text hopes to address one such recurring issue.
what is bad-jacketing?
“Bad-jacketing” (or “cop-jacketing,” “fed-jacketing,” or “snitch-jacketing”) is the practice of accusing people of being a cop, informant, fascist, or other kind of bad actor on specious or non-existent evidence.
The term has been used since at least the 1960s, where it primarily described COINTELPRO operations that bad-jacketed legitimate members of the Black Panther Party and other organisations. It was, ironically, rumours from infiltrators consolidating their own positions that led to organisations not only isolating but, in some cases, severely beating or executing innocent individuals.
why is bad-jacketing a problem?
A 2015 text titled “No badjacketing: the state wants to kill us; let’s not cooperate” by the Twin Cities GDC, Local 14, says:
- At the least, it pushes away people who have, or are willing, to do work and make sacrifices for the movements.
- Worse, it silences entire groups by sowing mistrust within them and making discussion of strategy and tactics difficult.
- Very commonly, those accused of acting as informants become so alienated from their accusers that they actually become snitches.
- Worst-case scenario, people die. That worst-case scenario is all too common and real, and there is a famous regional history to it as well, in the case of Anna Mae Aquash, a Native American woman from Canada who had worked and sacrificed tireless for the American Indian Movement, or AIM.
Southern Ontario in 2024 is, of course, not the US in the 1960s and 1970s. Our contemporary movements do not act on false accusations of snitching by killing the accused. And while we know that the police are trying to infiltrate us and turn people into informants, the vast majority of these accusations are definitely not coming from people on the state’s payroll.
The biggest threat that bad-jacketing poses to us, here and now, is that it singles people out for state repression. Militants are more likely to be on the receiving end of these accusations, but also, anecdotally, people of colour, neurodivergent people, and anyone who “does not belong” (and, of course, people who fall into all of those categories). In doing so, the people who make these accusations in effect carry out the work of the state. They reproduce the oppressive dynamics of the outside world and push people out – often, the very people our movements are supposed to be fighting for. By pushing them out, bad-jacketing then denies support to people who are often already at heightened risk of criminalisation. It makes people into easy targets, signaling to the police that they can get away with brutalising, arresting, and jailing someone without outcry from the community.
During the 2020 Black liberation uprisings in the US, posts flooded our feeds, warning of “agents provocateur.” Decontextualised videos of police unloading bricks spread like wildfire among both far-right and far-left social media networks. Fascist fear-mongering about out-of-town “ANTIFA” inciting riots trickled down into leftist hyper-vigilance against “white outside agitators.” These warnings often ventured into the realm of conspiracy theories, where protests with unknown organisers or cop cars on fire were signs of a police set-up.
All this has had devastating consequences. The normalisation of this paranoid urge to see false flags around every corner has empowered people “on the left” to share images and openly work to identify individuals carrying out illegal actions. Contrary to what they may believe, these people’s efforts to “root out infiltrators” have in many cases now become the actual basis for the state to arrest and jail its opponents.
Beyond that, bad-jacketing leads to feelings of insecurity and distrust that can tear apart a movement – even without any real infiltrators being involved. Both online and on the ground, we can hear breathless accusations that someone at a protest is an undercover Zionist operative, often for no reason beyond that “they make us look bad.” Zionists, constantly on the lookout for ammunition against us, gladly stoke the flames. Projects like the “Shirion Collective,” a Zionist doxing campaign that claimed on social media to be training undercover operatives, see and celebrate when the left eats its own. We must be equally vigilant against these psychological attacks, which are more subtle and yet can do more damage than any one undercover’s testimony.
“professionally trained to make us look bad”
– Kristina Beverlin on Isaiah Willoughby
On October 5, 2021, Isaiah Willoughby, a Black man, was sentenced to two years in prison for lighting a fire outside an abandoned police precinct in Seattle in June 2020. Willoughby acted because of the murders of Manuel Ellis, his former roommate, and George Floyd at the hands of the police.
When it happened, Kristina Beverlin, a white woman who now wears a kufiya and a “Free Palestine” hat in her profile picture, immediately blasted out a photo of Willoughby. She tweeted that he “just tried to start a fire at the abandoned precinct” and called on “everyone in Seattle to retweet the photo of this man.”
In subsequent tweets, she stated her belief that “SPD wanted the precinct to catch fire to make the peaceful protesters look bad, after SPD had looked like monsters for days.”
It was her initial tweet that appeared in a court affidavit against Willoughby, and her photo that the police disseminated to identify him. In other words, it was this white woman’s insistence that the police wanted someone to set fire to the precinct, and that anyone who did so could only have been directed by the police, that sent a Black man to prison. Like any other white vigilante, the self-deputised liberal peace police will discipline, with violence if necessary, Black or people of colour who step out of line. Unlike any other, she does it in the name of anti-racism, with an #ACAB hashtag in the same breath.
Similarly, social media users widely disseminated photos of a white woman suspected to have carried out the arson of the Atlanta Wendy’s where police murdered Rayshard Brooks. That she was white was proof to them that bad actors with no connection to the movement were behind property destruction during the uprisings, and that without those bad actors, the protests would have been peaceful. As it turned out, the woman in question was Natalie White, who Brooks had called his girlfriend on the night of his death. Two Black men, Chisom Kingston and John Wesley Wade, were later charged for the Wendy’s arson as well. As of December 2023, White and Kingston had accepted plea deals for probation, a fine, and community service, while Wade was scheduled to go to trial.
In both these examples, the people who sought to identify state agents “instigating” at protests were ultimately the people who acted as cops. The gravity of these actions cannot be overstated – they, and we, already know that police kill and torture Black people on the streets, and prison guards do the same against their captives on the inside.
Following the May 2022 leak of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Jane’s Revenge shared a communiqué about the fire-bombing of a predatory anti-choice “pregnancy centre” in Madison. The action sparked the usual uproar among the right about “woke ANTIFA terrorists” waging war against Christianity. But rather than defend the action’s righteousness, much of the left instead occupied itself with speculation about whether cursive graffiti and a “too-neat” circle-A meant that it was a false flag. The underlying logic here was that if something looked “too perfect,” if it made the right too angry, it couldn’t possibly be real. We may talk of rioting against the Supreme Court, but no one seriously means it.
In response to the right-wing outrage campaign about Jane’s Revenge, the FBI offered a bounty of up to $25,000 for information. Days later, in January 2023, the US Department of Justice indicted two people for graffiti on anti-abortion centres in Florida, actions that were also broadcast through Jane’s Revenge. The Florida investigation eventually produced in a total of four arrests, all but one of the defendants being women of colour. Worse, the Florida 4 were prosecuted under the FACE Act, a law intended to protect abortion access. Meanwhile, an investigation that involved 11 different state agencies and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force culminated in the March 2023 arrest of Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury for the Madison fire-bombing. Though the right jumped at the opportunity to gloat, widely publicising the defendants’ photos and personal information, charges against Roychowdhury and the Florida 4 received little attention from the left. Roychowdhury pled guilty after being denied pre-trial release and was sentenced to 90 months (7.5 years) in federal prison on April 10, 2024. Three of the Florida 4, after taking felony pleas that avoided convictions under the FACE Act, were also handed down prison time on September 12 of this year, ranging from 30 days to 1 year and 1 day. Popular support may not have prevented those prosecutions, but the significance of solidarity shouldn’t be understated. Instead, much of the left’s message to militants turns out to have been: “we’ll call you feds, and when it turns out we were wrong, we’ll abandon you anyways.”
Though we never had our own Third Precinct moment, left networks in Ontario fell victim to many of the same conspiratorial impulses. Reposted Instagram stories warned of “suspicious piles of bricks” left as bait near march routes and even “black blocs from Montréal” coming into town to start riots.
While, regrettably, no such riot materialised here in 2020, the bad-jacketing of the black bloc has a long history in Southern Ontario, as in other regions. A particularly egregious example came in the wake of the Toronto G20 in 2010, where liberals convinced themselves that the property damage was all an inside job and set out looking for proof. They singled out a muscular white man in combat boots and “cop-like” black pants for looking suspicious, digging up every image of him they could find. All of this crowd-sourced evidence built a convenient case for the police, who arrested and jailed the target of their suspicions.
A pattern emerges: subsequent repression draws only a fraction of the concern that the broad left had earlier put into interrogating the legitimacy of an action. This is one of the most insidious functions of badjacketing and disavowal – it aids the state project of disappearing people. Speculation about false flags, made exponentially worse by social media and algorithms that egg on endless engagement, steals away energy that could be spent preparing for the repression to come. It turns actions into abstractions ripe for every person to project their own arguments. That abstraction removes militants’ humanity from the picture, enjoining us to forget that real people, putting their lives on the line for the movement, must have lit the match or thrown the brick. The collective failure to adequately show up for each defendant and prisoner in this section – and many more not named – goes beyond a culture of disposability. It is a mass forgetting that makes each of us who partakes in it complicit in the work of the police, prisons, and the carceral state to not only extinguish our resistance but also erase our memory of its very possibility – and our memory and connection to the people who’ve sacrificed to keep that possibility alive.
when people are occupied, resistance is justified
The movement for Palestine has long been one of the most hyper-surveiled and attacked. Only when it comes to the Palestinian struggle will even the most mild, pacifist expressions of support land someone on McCarthyist blacklists like Canary Mission, extensive repositories of personal information stretching back years. It is no wonder, then, that people are – correctly – concerned about being targeted by our enemies, which include not just the settler colonial state itself but also Zionists who self-organise outside of it.
Unfortunately, this has once again meant a dangerous resurgence of bad-jacketing. In February 2024, social media posts from the “Shirion Collective” sparked mass outrage and panic among supporters of Palestine. Announcing an “Operation Global Insight,” the posts claimed to be launching an “undercover operation” in key locations such as Toronto. “Volunteers willing to wear keffiyehs and walk [masked] in these demonstrations” would “be provided an hour long basic training by one of [their] ex-Mossad team leads.” Further, “individuals with Arabic-sounding names and Middle Eastern appearance may be uniquely positioned for deeper infiltration and will receive cash compensation for their vital role in [the] operation.”
Though the collective is, without a question, real, there is plenty of reason to believe that the reaction to the post was disproportionate to their actual abilities. Sensationalist claims of Mossad ties in an emoji-studded public tweet do not paint a picture of a sophisticated intelligence operation. Neither do their existing “exposés” on social media, which, despite techno-babble buzzwords about AI, are largely limited to reposting other people’s footage and open-source information that anyone with access to Google could easily retrieve. The description of walking around at protests and “law enforcement presence” suggests no actual knowledge of how Palestine solidarity groups organise or bring in new members. A few people with bad intentions joining a march of hundreds or thousands, where every angle is already recorded and streamed live on Instagram, can hardly be characterised as “infiltration.”
If that were not enough on its own, the White Rose Society, an anti-fascist research group, shared internal screenshots from Shirion’s Telegram channel that confirmed the post’s real purpose was to sow fear and distrust. One Shirion volunteer is quoted as saying:
We won’t need to do anything. They will:
- Tone down
- Police their own
- Maybe even beat up their own just because they think those are us
That summary of their goals succinctly re-states the risks that bad-jacketing poses to our movements.
Even before the Shirion scare, claims that someone was secretly a Zionist or cop were already commonplace. People who wear the symbols or fly the flags of the Palestinian resistance have been accused of being “agitators,” sent by Zionist organisations like B’nai Brith to make protestors look bad. Over-the-shoulder glimpses of someone’s phone or poor fashion choices have been presented as evidence that a protestor is actually an undercover. Online, Palestinians have been accused of being Zionist sockpuppets off of little more than bad feelings. And, naturally, even minor disagreements or political critiques will end in allegations that so-and-so is a fed. While, thankfully, conspiratorial crowds here have not at least yet handed over one of our own to the cops, these accusations are sometimes accompanied by calls to act against someone. In one case recently, a queer person of colour known to other attendees was followed, harassed, and filmed aggressively at a protest because someone had decided for no clear reason that they were a Zionist in disguise.
As the police continue to crack down on us, it is all the more crucial that we learn from the mistakes of the recent past. We cannot let our rightful vigilance lead us to attack our own comrades. Nor should we water down our political lines, our demands, or our tactics for fear that the media and the right will smear us – they do that regardless. It may not be possible to eliminate some, faint chance that an infiltrator is behind a resistance flag, a punch thrown at a Zionist, a brick through a window, but far more likely is that some brave person, who has chosen to more boldly and unabashedly confront this genocidal system and its supporters, is responsible. For that, they deserve our support and our solidarity against whatever repression may come, not our condemnation.
knowing our enemies
An over-emphasis on undercovers may lead to an under-emphasis on other security vulnerabilities. Rather than acting according to a one-size-fits-all checklist or, worse, reacting to threats only as they appear, it’s important to proactively identify and individually study threats in order to understand how to address them. That is to say, what – specifically – is your enemy trying to do? How do they do it? The process of answering these questions is known as threat modeling.
Accounts like Shirion, Leviathan, or StopAntisemitism are real threats, as any of their victims know all too well. But OSINT, as well as everyday acquaintances, are much likelier to be the source of their information.
Your personal Instagram or TikTok page might already give away your identity, the protests you attend, your work or school, and the identities of your friends and family members. Your employer might publicly share profiles, including photos, of all of their staff on their website. Tools like PimEyes and FaceCheck.ID allow anyone willing to pay for them to run facial recognition technology and search the Internet for a given face.
If you’re a student, a Zionist classmate could easily recognise you from criticising racism in class and look up your personal information in a school database. A right-wing former colleague could remember you for being politically outspoken at your shared workplace. Knowing the true identities of everyone at a march will do nothing to prevent doxing if, for example, that march is being streamed online, your face is exposed, and your social media is public.
what about the real infiltrators and provocateurs?
Infiltration – actual infiltration, where someone comes into our organisations and our lives, pretending to be our friend, only to hand information over to the state – should not be taken lightly. But our baseline understanding of it often takes the form of a few convenient tropes, reinforcing existing biases against militancy and justifying dismissiveness towards criticism. These tropes prevent us from truly knowing our enemies.
The late Matt Cicero wrote that:
[there is a] misconception that all infiltrators act as agents provocateurs who try to manipulate activists into taking illegal, violent, unpopular, and ineffective actions. But as Gary T. Marx points out in his theory of social movement infiltration, social movements are damaged by “opposing organizational, tactical, and resource mobilization tasks.” In other words, infiltrators suppress social movements by fomenting divisions and internal conflicts, diverting energies toward defending the movement rather than pursuing broader social goals, sowing misinformation or damaging reputations, obstructing the supply of resources (money, transport, meeting spaces), or sabotaging planned actions. Many infiltrators are thus better described as agents suppressants, who are there to gather intelligence and channel groups away from militant action.
[…]Incidents of provocation can be high-profile and sensational, such as undercover police posing as members of the black bloc at Montebello. This can lead activists to paint all militant action as the work of agents provocateurs, even if there is no evidence that this is true. Conversely, because of the low-profile of most agents suppressants, activists are often unaware of their role and impact in pacifying and controlling social movements.
The spectre of the provocateur itself, then, carries out the suppressant role of “put[ting] a damper on evolving movement militancy.”
The single-minded focus on the agent provocateur often goes hand-in-hand with a short-term view of state repression as having only two main goals:
But as Cicero describes, the state is additionally engaged in a long-term project of suppression and counter-insurgency. The police cannot arrest every dissident – but they don’t need to jail us all to successfully maintain the colonial order. The central goal of counter-insurgency is to preserve legitimacy and control.
To that end, some further goals of state repression include, but are not limited to:
We should examine the issue of infiltration with all of these goals in mind. David Gilbert says, “[t]here is no simple litmus test to differentiate sincere militancy from provocation or honest caution from suppression.” The same extends to the search for infiltrators more broadly. Most of the time, the only truly conclusive proof that someone is a police infiltrator comes from seeing the evidence against you that they’ve handed over to the state after you’ve been charged. That isn’t of much help – by the time you have those court documents in your possession, the damage will already have been done. That is assuming that the information they collect ever goes to court at all. RCMP documents from the G20 suggest that there may have been as many as 12 undercover officers. Far fewer than that were ever exposed by name, and the remainders’ identities may never be known.
People who’ve experienced the profound betrayal of finding out that someone they knew was an undercover or informant often end up drawing conclusions that are diametrically opposed from one another. But a common thread persists through most of their takeaways: there are few ways to prove for certain that someone is a cop, and many ways that the hunt for infiltrators itself instead undermines our work and furthers the state’s goals.
Accordingly, we should turn our energies to proactively building a security culture that protects us from both infiltration and other security threats. Much has been written on this subject already. In short: solid security practices should mean that an undercover cop is prevented from gathering meaningful information even if we do not know who they are, and that security risks are dealt with regardless of whether an individual is specifically acting on behalf of the state. If you do everything right, a plainclothes still won’t know who among the bloc smashed that ATM, even if they saw it happen with their own eyes.
As the ever-green “Why Misogynists Make Great Informants” reminds us, many of the greatest threats to our movements may not officially collaborate with the police either. In the Toronto anti-fascist scene alone, multiple people accused of misogyny and sexual violence/gender-based violence later went on to renounce the left, consort with their former opponents, and attack (verbally, physically, and with legal threats) their former comrades. None of those people, to our knowledge, were undercover cops, nor were they secretly fascists all along. Looking for a non-existent smoking gun to show that someone was lying about their identity would – and did – only delay people from taking necessary action against them when the myriad of other red flags should have been more than enough.
naming our enemies
The epidemic of bad-jacketing is inseparable from the problem of peace policing. Many organisers advocate for a policy of de-escalation at all costs, even in the face of potentially deadly violence from police and Zionists. They speak of “agitators” who disrupt and “escalate” “peaceful protests” – a nebulous euphemism that they apply to both the Zionist who shows up with a knife and the militant who comes prepared to fight back.
We should be clear: our enemies are not “agitators.”
Our enemies are the police, who brutalise us and lock us away to enforce settler colonial order. Our enemies are Zionists and other white supremacists, who assault and harass us in the streets, and stalk and threaten us in our everyday lives. Our enemies are politicians and other establishment liberals, who carry out colonial and imperialist genocides, here, in Palestine, and around the world, all the while crying crocodile tears about a so-called humanitarian crisis that they created. Our enemies are legacy media institutions, who smear resistance as terrorism and mobilise support for each of these attacks.
We must take care to differentiate between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, and to distinguish between enemies and potential friends. Too often, we see organisers reject co-strugglers in order to appeal to liberal institutions that will never be on our side. They may frame the conservative path as the only strategic option, rejecting open support for armed struggle, militant direct action, and anything else that would create “bad optics.” Disagreements from co-strugglers are treated as threats worse than that of liberal media, who we must appeal to for sympathy, or Zionists and cops, who we must appease for our safety.
When our enemies attack us anyways, these organisers pin the blame not on the perpetrators but on the co-strugglers who deviate from their line. They forget that to be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing. Our enemies do not strive for unity with us, knowing that ours is an antagonistic contradiction, knowing that our collective liberation requires their annihilation. It is better that we, too, abandon any notions of conciliation and recognise our enemies as enemies.
For all these reasons, we urge people to draw a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. Abandon the euphemisms and name our enemies. When we struggle through our differences, let us do so with a shared understanding of what we are for and what we are against.
by every means necessary
Not only is bad-jacketing dangerous, it is disempowering and demobilising. It forecloses entire realms of possibility, insisting that we limit ourselves to the same set of legal, non-violent tactics. It threatens state violence against people who do not comply with those limitations being imposed upon their actions. Many people cannot take the risk of arrest. But something being risky does not make it impossible. Just because some of us cannot act does not mean that no one should.
While its meaning is sometimes lost, respecting a “diversity of tactics” means refusing to impose non-violence upon our co-strugglers and declining to condemn those that destroy property or take up arms. As a group of autonomous UCLA students writes in the wake of vicious assaults on their encampment:
We have noticed a trend of the desire to appear peaceful for the media taking precedent over the right of protestors to self defense, mirroring the world’s response to Palestinians’ right to self defense in the face of blatant fascist attacks and eliminationist violence.
We cannot allow our resistance movement to demand obedience over safety in the same way as western imperialist forces against the colonized.
Without drawing false equivalence with a people living under active bombardment and military invasion, the liberal urge that leads people to denounce burning precincts or fake clinics as “giving police an excuse to crack down” is the same that denounces the Palestinian resistance for “giving Israel an excuse to destroy Gaza.” We must refuse any invitation to distance ourselves as the “good,” “peaceful,” “innocent” ones. Instead, we affirm the right of Palestinians and all people to resist colonial domination by any means necessary.
We would remind our co-strugglers, too, that our enemies do not care about the truth, and they have no conscience. We see this in the viciousness with which the police enforce an unprecedented ban on overpass protests in Toronto, where people rallied on the sidewalk to wave flags and chant. We see it in the eagerness with which a long list of electeds, including the Prime Minister himself, leapt to denounce a protest of a Jewish hospital that never happened. We see it in the adamance with which Zionists call the very existence of Palestinians a terrorist threat against them, no matter how young, no matter how innocent, no matter how non-violent. Right-wing propagandists will fabricate scandals out of thin air, and the establishment will happily take up their version of the story. Even if each and every one of us swears to turn the other cheek to our assailants, as long as we challenge the colonial status quo, in our enemies’ eyes, we will never be peaceful.
Another path is possible, and the movement to Stop Cop City sets a powerful example. In February, a journalist asked spokesperson Mary Hooks of Vote to Stop Cop City whether organisers condemned arsons of police vehicles. She answered:
Hell no. No. Not at all, And to be honest with you, Atlanta deserves more than that. Real talk, they’re lucky, this city is lucky, this country is lucky. Atlanta has its hands in literally murdering Palestinians right now. You think we give a damn about some equipment? Not at all. Not at all.
But some of us, we cannot take that risk. And those who can, bless them. Bless them. I cannot take that risk. But Lord knows, I’ll sit with my lighter and be like, damn.
[…]We need every, every means necessary to deal in the police state we are dealing with. So I don’t care, no, and I would imagine my comrades would say the same. No, not gonna condemn nobody for doing righteously what they need to do when our city has silenced every quote-unquote proper, democratic process.
The movement’s aboveground and clandestine elements are two parts of a whole. Both are necessary for our victory.
Listen to Isaiah Willoughby speak in his own words on Kite Line Radio:
Support defendants and prisoners from the George Floyd Uprisings:
Contribute to the Florida 4’s commissary and find other ways to support through the Anti-Repression Committee of South Florida:
more on peace policing
“ACAB Includes Peace Police: Three Report Backs from Palestinian Solidarity Actions” (November 2023) on Archive.org, online at archive.org/details/acab-includes-peace-police-en-print-8/page/2/mode/2up
“Peace Police are Police: How Protest Marshals Sabotage Liberation and Protect the State” (December 2023) on North Shore Counter-Info, online at north-shore.info/2024/03/11/peace-police-are-police-new-zine-classic-image/
more on security
“Confidence. Courage. Connect. Trust. A proposal for security culture” (November 5, 2019) on North Shore Counter-Info, online at north-shore.info/2019/11/05/confidence-courage-connection-trust-a-proposal-for-security-culture/
“Doxcare: Prevention and Aftercare for Those Targeted by Doxxing and Political Harassment” (August 26, 2020) on CrimethInc., online at crimethinc.com/2020/08/26/doxcare-prevention-and-aftercare-for-those-targeted-by-doxxing-and-political-harassment
The Threat Library by the No Trace Project, online at notrace.how/threat-library/
“Threat Modeling Fundamentals” by Håkan Geijer on Riot Medicine, online at opsec.riotmedicine.net
more on infiltration
Fuck the (Hamilton) Police, online at fuckhps.noblogs.org
“Infiltrated! How to prevent political police from undermining grassroots solidarity” (May 1, 2017) in Briarpatch Magazine, online at briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/infiltrated
“Living among us: Activists speak out on police infiltration” (July 1, 2011) by Tim Groves, online at briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/living-among-us
“Stop Hunting Sheep: A Guide to Creating Safer Networks” (2011) on Sprout Distro, online at sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/security/stop-hunting-sheep/
“The G20 Main Conspiracy Group: The Charges and How They Came to Be” (2012) on the No Trace Project, online at notrace.how/resources/#toronto-g20-main-conspiracy-group
“Why Misogynists Make Great Informants” (Spring/Summer 2010) by Courtney Desiree Morris on Incite! National, online at incite-national.org/2010/07/15/why-misogynists-make-great-informants-how-gender-violence-on-the-left-enables-state-violence-in-radical-movements/
Submission
from It’s Going Down
There’s a lot happening, so let’s dive right in!
September saw Running/Pushing Down the Walls events in solidarity with political prisoners held in Mexico City, Olympia, WA, Portland and Eugene, OR, Los Angeles and Huntington Park, CA, Chicago, IL, Philadelphia, PA, Bloomington, IN, Lowell, MA, Brooklyn, NY, and Bristol, UK. Collectively, over 40K was raised for political prisoners and the Anarchist Black Cross warchest.
Group photo from Running Down the Walls in Philadelphia, PA
Unicorn Riot have also produced a video from the Philadelphia event.
A Curbfest event in support of political prisoners will be held in Philadelphia on October 5th.
Further ahead, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak are still calling for people to organize Shut ‘Em Down demonstrations and actions during the week of December 6th-13th.
Events have been held in NYC and Philadelphia for I Am Maroon, the new book about Russell Maroon Shoatz.
There’s a call for someone based in the Delaware area to get involved in organizing the campaign to free Dwayne “BIM” Staats of the Vaughn 17. BIM recently took part in a Black August event where he was able to speak to audiences in Albuquerque and San Francisco about the urgent need to free Joseph “Joe Joe” Bowen and all political prisoners. His codefendant Jarreau “Ruk” Ayers recently shared some comments on the execution of Marcellus Williams, and Alejandro “Capo” Rodriguez Ortiz has published a new poem and a short audio message on the legacy of the Vaughn 17.
See Uprising Support for more info, and check out the Antirepression PDX site for updates from Portland cases. To the best of our knowledge they currently include:
David Elmakayes 77782-066
FCI McKean
Federal Correctional Institution
P.O. Box 8000
Bradford, PA 16701
Khalif Miller #70042-066
USP Big Sandy
U.S. Penitentiary
P.O. Box 2068
Inez, KY 41224
Submission
One night not too long ago we hit the construction site beside the Grays Ferry bridge. We tore out surveying stakes and smashed the windows on one of the machines that’s turning another of Philly’s wild spots into an ugly ass dirt pile. We get off on frequent, diverse acts of sabotage that target the state’s compulsive war on wildness. Stay wet and wild!
-a feral band of saboteurs
from Making Worlds Books
ADVANCE REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED
Join us for a night of revolutionary education and communication as we learn about, and reach out to, some of the 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in Zionist dungeons. We’ll talk about conditions in the prison, prisoner organization and resistance and what we can do to get their voices outside of the prison walls. Organized by Philly WAWOG and Samidoun.
Laura Martin is a labor historian and a member of Philly WAWOG and the Bay Area Anti-Repression Committee, a bail fund and political education collective.
Abu Ali is a coordinator with the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity network, an international organization that supports and uplifts Palestinian political prisoners
from Unicorn Riot
Philadelphia, PA — The unionized workforce that handles concessions at the South Philadelphia Sports Complex started to strike on Monday, September 23. Hundreds of Aramark stadium workers that bargain with the UNITE HERE Philly Local 274 union are demanding new contracts.
Unicorn Riot was told that Aramark, which is headquartered in Center City Philadelphia with a market capitalization value of $9.8 billion, has tried to prevent the unionized workers from qualifying for healthcare plans by dividing their hours between the three stadiums – Citizens Bank Park, Lincoln Financial Field and the Wells Fargo Center. (In a statement to NBC10 Aramark claimed it has now offered to count all stadium hours towards health coverage in a new contract.)
“Our contracts have all expired in all three buildings so we’re trying to consolidate the work. So, three different buildings doing the same job, you get different pay rates now. We want it to be the same pay rate. So if you’re a cook, a cook, a cook [at those locations] you get the same pay. It’s not like that. We want the hours to count from all three buildings to qualify people for health care. Right now they keep the hours separate.”
Kathy Hazel, Aramark concessions worker at Wells Fargo Center for 24+ years
“We might have worked all three buildings in a week, we still get one check from Aramark. But we get three different wages, that’s the issue here. […] They don’t want to agree to benefits like PTO. I understand it’s a ‘part time’ in one building, but when you’re in all three buildings you’re working like full time, you’re getting full time hours… but they’re still trying to treat us as if we are part time.”
Tarell ‘Doe’ Martin, Aramark concessions worker
On Sept. 24, outside a Phillies baseball game, union members called on fans to avoid purchasing food, drink and clothing inside the stadium, to pressure the company to negotiate a better deal. Aramark touts that “total income inclusive of wages and tips for this group of employees have risen 61% over the past five years,” while we heard from the workers that this is disingenuous because the tips have come from the public, not their employer. For an hourly cost of living increase, Aramark offered fifty cents a year, then another ten cents on top of that a year,
Many of the Aramark workers are not tipped at all, so they want to improve their base pay and benefits. “I noticed that they did not thank the Philadelphia fans for helping pay the salaries of their workers,” said picketing union member Kathy Hazel. “They don’t get any credit for any money I get from tips. […] There’s a lot of workers that are not tipped workers. And we’re here to support them, so that the hourly workers get an increase. They’re not getting tips, and we stick together.”
Down the street, independent vendors offered pretzels with notes on their carts saying that Aramark was on strike. Anthony Oliver with the striking Aramark workers pointed out that once again the ‘Counter Terrorism’ unit of the Philadelphia Police has turned up at Aramark labor protests. Forty-five Aramark workers were arrested in June by a force that included the same type of police we saw outside the recent presidential debate with ‘Counter Terrorism’ markings. Outside a Biden fundraiser last December, one officer on that team told Unicorn Riot that they are always deployed to protests but declined to name the specific policy which enables this.
UNITE HERE Philly Local 274 represents about 4000 private sector hotel and food service workers throughout the Philadelphia region, according to their website.
Prison labor is “remarkably common within the food system,” according to the Hunter College New York City Food Policy Center, and Aramark is at the heart of this game: it is notorious for its role in the food side of the prison-industrial complex. Its subsidiary Aramark Correctional Services provides services to hundreds of U.S. prisons and jails, privatized Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails operated by CoreCivic, along with contracts in at least 35 states, according to an investigation by American Friends Service Committee. It has long been notorious for substandard, contaminated and undercooked food.
Aramark investors benefit from prison labor used to prepare and package food in some prisons under the In2Work program. Students at Barnard College, New York University and Ireland’s Trinity College successfully got Aramark campus contracts cancelled. Georgetown University has been another site of pressure against Aramark both because of its prison labor and over on-campus workers’ contract in March.
In its corrections FAQ, Aramark says it’s in this business because “all people deserve healthy, nutritious meals.” A September 2023 Prison Journalism Project report by Justin Slavinski, “Meet the Company Getting Rich Off My Prison’s Awful Food,” described how the “100-or-so” residents in a Florida penitentiary who cook and clean are “wholly unpaid,” slashing Aramark’s labor costs to a small fraction of what legal employees would cost. Jail inmates have pushed for wages, and a prison strike protested Aramark.
This isn’t the only major political issue with the stadiums and sports construction in the city. The 76ers professional basketball team is seeking to move away from the Sports Complex and into Center City in 2031, by demolishing part of the Fashion District mall and building a $1.55 billion new sports arena site called “76Place” which is said to include 395 residential units.
This plan is opposed by many people involved with the Chinatown neighborhood a block away. “Save Chinatown” supporters argue that the 76Place project will displace and damage their neighborhood. Nonetheless, on September 18 first-term mayor Cherelle Parker announced her administration reached an agreement to move the Center City arena forward. On Sept. 25, the mayor announced more details in a community meeting, while further protests are expected.
Earlier this month, we heard from local activists trying to “ban artificial turf installation on city property including parks and recreation centers,” specifically in a huge set of proposed soccer fields at the large FDR Park which is directly west of the Sports Complex. (The FDR Park construction project has attracted opposition and protests since 2022.)
Another corporate giant in the city, Comcast, has its own designs on the Sports Complex. In February, Comcast Spectacor unveiled a $2.5 billion multi-phase master plan. Some observers suspect that Comcast will once again fleece the public coffers and obtain a development subsidy, like the tens of millions it obtained for the construction of their Center City skyscraper, along with tax breaks.
Philadelphia will be hosting six games at an upcoming FIFA World Cup in the Lincoln Financial Center, which runs during June-July 2026. FIFA scandals may have affected Philadelphia’s earlier bid in 2015. The push for this bid started in 2016. The city got up to $10 million in aid for the FIFA event from the state legislature via House Bill 1300 which was signed by Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro on December. In 2021 the city pitched using FDR Park for practice fields; however, as we heard at the PFAS protest, FIFA does not host World Cup games on artificial turf, so all 2026 matches will need to be on natural grass.
If you missed the chance to donate, you still can via these links:
https://fundrazr.com/RDTW2024ABCF
https://fundrazr.com/supportpdtw24
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/nycabc
Philly
Philly ABC held 2024 RDTW on Sunday, September 15th in solidarity with Palestinians resisting genocide. Philly ABC’s RDTW cleared 400 participants: 2 from inside prison and 398 outside plus multiple dogs and a kitten. People rolled in wheelchairs, bikes, and roller skates aswell as participating on foot. A Samidoun member joined us to speak about their important work supporting political prisoners in Palestine.
In addition to our very popular main shirt design by Sugarbombing, wemade two limited edition shirts in solidarity with Gaza and commemorating 25 years of RDTW. We are selling the last of the stock on our website at phillyabc.org/merch/, with the proceeds going towardsthe ABCF Warchest/Gaza mutual aid split.
Due to ongoing shirt sales, our total funds raised is still growing. Wealso are working with two matching donors to maximize the impact, which should help us clear over $40,000 in total. We will post the full reportback with details to phillyabc.org in November.
from Idavox
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence. Amy Wax is out after years of racist demagoguery.
PHILADELPHIA, PA – The University of Pennsylvania published a public reprimand against racist professor Amy Wax announcing her suspension from teaching for a year and other sanctions. This comes less than two months before she is scheduled to speak at this year’s American Renaissance (AmRen) Conference, a White Supremacist event organized by Jared Taylor, the publisher of American Renaissance who Wax had invited to speak at the university last year and has done so again for her classes this December.
“The Board recommended sanctions including a one-year suspension from the University at half pay; the loss of your named chair; the loss of summer pay in perpetuity; the requirement that you note in public appearances that you speak for yourself alone and not as a University or Penn Carey Law School faculty member; and a public reprimand,” Provost John L. Jackson wrote in the reprimand to Wax, which cited a history of not just making derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status but also in doing so breaching the requirement that student grades be kept private. An example of this was a 2017 interview with Brown University professor Glenn Loury a prominent Black conservative who regularly places the blame on Black people for racism leveled against them, she claimed Black students practically never graduate at the top of their law school classes. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half,” Wax, who has often attributed this observation to genetics, said on his show. In 2018 citing this statement and claiming that it was false, Dean Ted Ruger barred Wax from teaching mandatory first-year law courses. The next year, Wax spoke at the Edmund Burke Foundation’s National Conservatism conference in Washington D.C. and declared while discussing a immigration policy that favored European nations over others that she agreed with Donald Trump’s description of non-European countries as “shithole countries,” argued for a “cultural distance” approach to immigration that “preserves the United States as a Western and First World nation,” and that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.
Wax particularly stoked anger on campus by inviting Jared Taylor, himself a eugenicist who believes in the inferiority of Black persons to Whites, to speak to her classes in 2021 and 2023. During last year’s invitation, Wax photographed those protesting the event as Taylor disparaged the students assembled against him. According to Philadelphia Magazine, Taylor was invited by Wax to speak to her class in December but due to her sanction it is not known if this will still take place. Wax meanwhile will be speaking during the AmRen conference Nov. 15-17 at Montgomery Bell Park Inn in Burns, TN. The conference, which was attended by organizers of the tragic Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville two weeks before that event and promoted there, has seen a decline in numbers in recent years even though they have featured more prominent figures such as former House Rep. Steve King, former columnist Michelle Malkin, Laura Loomer, a neo-fascist podcaster recently seen in the company of Donald Trump, and this year Anthony Cumia the onetime radio host best known for his “Opie and Anthony” program.
Upon hearing of the sanctions imposed on Wax, Taylor angrily ranted on his podcast, saying it sent a bad precedent. “What has happened to Professor Wax is absolutely disgusting and lamentable and who knows? Maybe she will sue!” Taylor also complained that none of the news articles he read on her case noted her upcoming AmRen conference address. Meanwhile, members of Penn’s Black Law Students Association, regarded the sanctions an “overdue step” but “far from sufficient.” The group called on the administration to fire Wax and ban Taylor from campus. It is indeed rare to punish a tenured faculty member, this being the first such occurrence under Faculty Senate processes in at least 20 years.
Wax is slated to participate on a panel this Saturday in McLean, Virgina at the fall meeting of the Philadelphia Society alongside Trump-appointed Judge David J. Porter of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Helen Andrews, editor at Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative, who once wrote a fluff piece about eugenicist Steve Sailer, and J. Joel Alicea a law professor at the Catholic University of America.
from Never Sleep
LET the FLOOD of AL-AQSA DROWN the SETTLER EMPIRE!
Call for a Week of Rage from October 7–14: Direct action in solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance and anti-colonial movements in Turtle Island.
To act alongside the Al-Quds Axis and ‘bring the war home’ requires nothing less than a revival of anti-colonial militancy in this occupied continent. Free Palestine means death to amerika.
In commemorating one year of Operation Toufan Al-Aqsa, this is a call to go beyond the routine stage-managed ‘protest’ parades; this is a call to organize and sustain attacks on all entities, institutions, and infrastructures of the genocidal u.s.-zionist settler-imperialist order. Strike fear into the hearts of the comfortable colonizers, unsettle the settlers, just as the Palestinian Mujahideen have done.
Honor the martyrs through action. From Palestine to Lebanon to Yemen, to the millions of Native and Afrikan peoples across these lands—carry on the fight of those who dared to resist the settler-invader hordes and their capitalist slaveocracy. Target the many politicians, pigs, and profiteers that uphold the amerikan settler empire and its zionist spawn.
Share this graphic online, print and disseminate this call to action at demos, gatherings, study groups. [PDF: AlAqsaWoR]
Organize a crew—at least three people—map out the terrain, assemble necessary tools, make a plan, and go on the offensive. For ideas, check out past actions and tactical resources on unityoffields.org, and submit a report back to the_unity_of_fields@proton.me.
As Al-Qassam urban guerrillas have demonstrated, a small dedicated cell can do untold damage upon the enemy. In the midst of total genocidal devastation, the Resistance is still able to obliterate the zionist entity’s tanks with just a few men. Let’s muster the courage and conviction so we too can learn from their revolutionary example.
GLORY to the MARTYRS
VICTORY to the RESISTANCE
WHAT IS COMING IS GREATER
from Instagram
from Unicorn Riot
West Philadelphia, PA – Over 100 people came out early Sunday afternoon for a banquet celebrating political prisoners and their loved ones and other supporters.
The 8th annual ‘Prisoners’ Families Brunch’ was held at the OneArt Community Center on 52nd Street, with this year’s event honoring the late Russell Maroon Shoatz (whose autobiography ‘I Am Maroon’ was just released) and Anthony ‘Ant’ Smith, a Philly community organizer and teacher who recently got out of prison after being locked up on federal charges stemming from George Floyd protests in Philadelphia in 2020. Speeches included a few readings from the book and remarks from people Shoatz inspired over the years including other former prisoners incarcerated alongside him.
Organizations endorsing the event included The Care Space Project, Philly Anarchist Black Cross, The Abolitionist Law Center, Ubuntu Freedom, Building Fearless Futures, Landing Freedom and Black Lives Matter Philly.
Watch Unicorn Riot’s full coverage of the event below:
On October 30, 2020 Unicorn Riot streamed a press conference after Smith was arrested by federal authorities for events during the 2020 uprising:
