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Title: From J20 to Charlottesville Author: CrimethInc. Date: August 18, 2017 Language: en Topics: J20, Charlottesville, repression, US, fascism, analysis Source: Retrieved on 23rd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/18/from-j20-to-charlottesville-repressing-dissent-from-above-and-below
Over the past two years, the right wing has declared war on protest in
the United States. They’ve fought this struggle from the top down with
police, courts, and legislatures—and from the bottom up with militias,
fascist groups, and lone extremists. These strategies work in tandem to
threaten social movements. This is what connects the fascist murder in
Charlottesville last weekend to over 200 demonstrators arrested at
Trump’s inauguration on January 20 who were all charged with eight
identical felonies just for being on the same city block. This
connection is all the more obvious after August 15, when Trump attacked
anti-fascists and disingenuously denied that the fascists who chanted
Nazi slogans in unison were all white supremacists. The White House
stands solidly on the side of those promoting and orchestrating
far-right violence.
How do state and autonomous right-wing attacks reinforce each other? Why
is the right escalating its campaign to repress dissent? And how can we
counter this repression?
While it’s nothing new for the state to repress protest, the past two
years of legal and legislative attacks represent a substantial
escalation against resistance movements. Since the uprising in Ferguson
forced national attention onto racist police violence, the idea of Black
communities, poor people, and radicals becoming ungovernable has
inspired some and terrified others. Protestors inspired by Ferguson have
blocked highways, occupied police departments, sabotaged pipelines, shut
down airports, and disrupted Trump rallies.
But defenders of the economic and racial status quo have taken advantage
of this to stoke white working-class resentment and suburban fears of
disorder. Trump’s image as “the law and order candidate” capitalized on
the racialized concerns stirred up by this wave of protest.
From day one, the new administration made good on its promises to crack
down on protest. On January 20, over two hundred counter-inaugural
demonstrators were trapped in a kettle and mass arrested. Rather than
receiving citations or misdemeanors, they now face the prospect of
decades in prison simply for being caught on the street during a march.
Meanwhile, hundreds of cases from Standing Rock clog the North Dakota
courts, where water protectors face fines and prison terms for their
efforts to prevent private companies from profiting on the poisoning of
Sioux people’s water supplies.
In addition to maximizing repression through the current legal system,
politicians are expanding the law to further criminalize demonstrations.
Nearly twenty state legislatures introduced anti-protest bills this year
that range from troubling to downright bizarre. Arizona politicians
attempted to allow the state to seize the assets of people arrested for
protesting, while North Carolina legislators tried to invent something
called “economic terrorism” and to force protestors to pay the cost of
police efforts to repress them. North Dakota’s legislature passed a
litany of new bills fed to them by the pipeline industry, from allowing
police to use weaponized drones against demonstrations to increasing the
legal penalties for a wide range of activity. This legislation went
directly into effect against hundreds of water protectors.
Finally, this year, legislators in Florida, North Dakota, and Tennessee
have attempted to pass bills allowing drivers to run over protestors
without legal consequences. This is especially chilling in the aftermath
of Charlottesville.
Every one of these laws emerged as a direct response to protests that
were effectively disrupting the status quo. The sponsors of North
Carolina’s failed anti-protest bill specifically cited the ferocity of
resistance in Charlotte after the police murdered Keith Lamont Jenkins
as their inspiration for the new law. The spread of highway blockades
during anti-police rebellions prompted a wide range of legislation
targeting the obstruction of roads, including the aforementioned “hit
and kill” bills. In response to widespread indigenous and ecological
resistance to pipeline construction, several new state laws would
advance penalties specifically tied to disruption of energy
infrastructure. These efforts by politicians to protect the interests of
their corporate cronies and police attest to the threat that our
movements pose.
But the state isn’t confident that legal methods alone will be enough to
stem the tide of popular resistance. Enter the autonomous fascists,
stage right.
Where police and legal restrictions haven’t sufficed to suppress
demonstrations, the armed right-wing has stepped in. Beginning in states
such as Arizona that have open carry laws and widespread gun culture,
right-wing demonstrators had already been appearing at their own rallies
visibly armed; yet until recently, they had rarely appeared at the
protests of their political opponents. In 2014, members of the Oath
Keepers, a right-wing militia, appeared in the streets of Ferguson
toting assault rifles. While most politicians and law enforcement
officials outwardly condemned this challenge to the state’s monopoly on
violence, in some places the state began openly partnering with the
grassroots extreme right. In June, the Multnomah County, Oregon
Republican Party voted to allow Three Percenters to provide
anti-protestor “security” for them at events.
Meanwhile, the alt-right and other fascists have slowly but surely
escalated from online threats to violent attacks. The massacre that
Dylan Roof perpetrated at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina
in 2015 failed to spark the race war he intended, but the following
year, the election of a president who openly courted white nationalists
provided the catalyst for increasing extreme right violence. Numerous
media outlets reported an immediate rise in racist, xenophobic, and
anti-Muslim activity after Trump’s election, from graffiti to verbal
harassment to physical assaults. Bigots have ramped up attacks on
mosques from Minnesota to Tennessee, while a man spouting Islamophobia
stabbed two people to death on a train in Portland, Oregon this spring.
While many of these attacks served as general intimidation against
marginalized groups, protests against oppression have become a
particular target for fascists. In 2015, heavily armed right-wingers
fired into a Black Lives Matter occupation in Minneapolis, injuring five
protestors; a bystander noted that they “were using police tactics.”
During the Trump campaign, Trump supporters frequently carried out
violent attacks on protestors; white nationalist Matthew Heimbach faced
criminal charges this spring for physically attacking a young Black
woman at a campaign speech. At a Seattle protest against Milo
Yiannopolis in January, a right-wing Milo fan shot an anti-racist
protestor in the stomach after threatening online to “start cracking
skulls” of “snowflakes.” Yet antifascists and anarchists remained the
villains in the discourse spread by politicians, police, and media
pundits, even as right-wing attacks continued to escalate. This
underscores that their goal is neither peace nor law and order, but
maintaining their power against all who threaten it.
The murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville is the latest event in
this crescendo of hate and violence. We must understand her death in the
context of the right-wing war on protest. It has been building
inexorably towards this outcome for years.
If right-wing citizens hadn’t taken the initiative to begin threatening
and injuring protestors, politicians in North Dakota wouldn’t have
introduced legislation to protect them. The growing Three Percenter and
militia movements aim to use force to secure the stability of Trump’s
rule in the face of widespread resistance. The stories we’ve heard from
the streets of Charlottesville—like so many other cities—show that the
police are happy to let fascists do their bloody work for them on the
streets.
And if the fascists go too far and provoke a popular backlash, as the
murder of Heather Heyer has, politicians will attempt to use that to
their advantage, too. By framing fascism and anti-fascism as symmetrical
forces of chaos and disruption, as Trump explicitly did in his initial
response, they present the state as the only force capable of restoring
order—through more police, surveillance, and control. Whether they
tacitly support or openly condemn vigilante violence, right-wing
politicians aim to come out ahead either way.
Make no mistake: the people who want us to accept white supremacy,
environmental destruction, and police murder are working together to
keep us out of the streets. They’re using every tactic they can—from
mass arrests to new laws to outright murder—because they’re afraid of
our power.
They are going to such lengths because all over the world, people are
coming together to threaten their privileges and profits. Countless
thousands of us have clogged the arteries of capital, affirmed the value
of Black lives against the brutality of the police, confronted pipelines
and power plants, shielded our neighbors from deportation, stood watch
against bigots at mosques, defended reproductive freedom, and organized
across the borders they attempt to impose on our land and in our hearts.
They know that unless they can terrorize us back into submission, their
days in power will be numbered.
In short, the right declared war on protest because we have the power to
take them down. It won’t be quick and it won’t be easy, but it is
possible, and they know it. They’re trying to raise the costs of
resistance so high that we’ll listen to Governor McAuliffe and hide out
at home while they continue impoverishing us, scapegoating immigrants
and Muslims, brutalizing people of color, subjugating women, poisoning
the earth, militarizing the borders, and escalating police surveillance
and control.
The options are clear: take the streets to fight together, or hide at
home while they come for us one by one. The choice is yours.